Libertarian Leanings

Post-partisan, my ass...

This is rich.

The Washington Times, which has covered the Barack Obama campaign from the start, was kicked off the Democrat's campaign plane for the final 72 hours of the race.

The Obama campaign informed the newspaper Thursday evening of its decision, which came two days after The Times editorial page endorsed Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama. The Times editorial page runs completely independent of the news department.

"This feels like the journalistic equivalent of redistributing the wealth, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars covering Senator Obama's campaign, traveling on his plane, and taking our turn in the reporter's pool, only to have our seat given away to someone else in the last days of the campaign," said Washington Times Executive Editor John Solomon.

"I hope the candidate that promises to unite America isn't using a litmus test to determine who gets to cover his campaign."

The Obama campaign confirmed two other newspapers, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Post, whose editorial boards have endorsed John McCain, were also kicked off the campaign for the final stretch.

And this comes right after Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic Senator from Nebraska wrote this really stupid editorial column about how Obama could walk the post-partisan walk. 

By my lights, the primary threat to the success of a President Obama will come from some Democrats who, emboldened by the size of their congressional majority, may try to kill trade agreements, raise taxes in ways that will destroy jobs, repeal the Patriot Act and spend and regulate to high heaven.

This is where Obama's persona is invaluable. He can withstand the arguments and pressure of the liberal wing in the Democratic caucus if, once elected, he is guided by the best instincts he has displayed on the campaign trail.

I believe this is likely because Obama will surround himself with professionals, not ideologues or acolytes.

Right Senator!  Great judgment!  And then Obama demonstrates that he will surround himself with only those who voice no disagreement.  With polls favoring Obama this close to election day, things look pretty grim for a post-partisan U.S.

Love gone bad

According to the Palm Beach Post, in a fit of rage a Huffington Post writer stabbed her former lover 222 times with a Philips screwdriver. 

BOYNTON BEACH — Carol Anne Burger killed her former lover by stabbing her 222 times with a Phillips-head screwdriver and then took pains to hide her crime, police said Wednesday.

Jessica Kalish, who shared a house with Burger despite breaking up with her more than a year ago, was found last Thursday stuffed in the backseat of her gun-metal BMW sedan, abandoned behind a medical office at 2300 S. Congress Avenue. Her blood was splashed around the rear end and undercarriage of the car, as if her killer had tried to load her into the trunk. The driver-side window was shattered.

[...]

Burger, who on Oct. 7 was tapped to cover the election for the Web site, The Huffington Post, still sometimes felt sad and isolated. Kalish, whom Burger had married in Massachusetts in 2005, had met another woman.

Acorn Whistleblower Testifies in Court

The Obama campaign claims it has no connection to ACORN, but in testimony yesterday former Project Vote employee Anita Moncrief said otherwise.  This according to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

The Obama campaign denies it "has any ties" to Acorn, but Mr. Obama's ties are extensive. In 1992 he headed a registration effort for Project Vote, an Acorn partner at the time. He did so well that he was made a top trainer for Acorn's Chicago conferences. In 1995, he represented Acorn in a key case upholding the constitutionality of the new Motor Voter Act -- the first law passed by the Clinton administration -- which created the mandated, nationwide postcard voter registration system that Acorn workers are using to flood election offices with bogus registrations.

Ms. MonCrief testified that in November 2007 Project Vote development director Karyn Gillette told her she had direct contact with the Obama campaign and had obtained their donor lists. Ms. MonCrief also testified she was given a spreadsheet to use in cultivating Obama donors who had maxed out on donations to the candidate, but who could contribute to voter registration efforts. Project Vote calls the allegation "absolutely false."

She says that when she had trouble with what appeared to be duplicate names on the list, Ms. Gillette told her she would talk with the Obama campaign and get a better version. Ms. MonCrief has given me copies of the donor lists she says were obtained from other Democratic campaigns, as well as the 2004 DNC donor lists.

In her testimony, Ms. MonCrief says she was upset by Acorn's "Muscle for Money" program, which she said intimidated businesses Acorn opposed into paying "protection" money in the form of grants. Acorn's Brian Kettering says the group only wants to change corporate behavior: "Acorn is proud of its corporate campaigns to stop abuses of working families."

ACORN is under investigation in at least 12 states, but ACORN and the Obama campaign assure us that it's no big deal.  It's only voter regitration fraud, not voting fraud.  Nothing to worry about.

Obama Derangement Syndrome

Kirsten Powers thinks she's discovered an original idea.  People are beginning to suffer from ODS, the Obama Derangement Syndrome.

IT'S official: Obama Derangement Syndrome is sweeping the nation.

The Urban Dictionary defines ODS as: "The acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the statements - nay - the very existence of Barack Obama."

ODS is a relative of "Bush Derangement Syndrome," a phrase originally coined by columnist Charles Krauthammer. Sufferers believe that President Bush caused Hurricane Katrina or 9/11, or intentionally lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, etc.

She has examples.  Here's one.

A Florida TV anchor recently demanded that Joe Biden explain why we shouldn't be worried that Obama would turn America into a socialist country. Incredibly, she asked Biden if Obama was a "Marxist."

Wonder where she got that.  Perhaps she reads National Review Online...

Actually, she got it from Obama:

In the tank

Ruth Marcus makes excuses.  She sees no evidence of the promised "new politics" in Barack Obama's campaign, but this in-the-tank columnist has the unsurprising explanation.

Accepting his party's nomination in Denver, Obama decried the use of "stale tactics to scare voters." A few weeks later, he was airing ads warning that John McCain wanted to privatize Social Security and would slash seniors' benefits almost in half. You can't get much staler than that.

Certainly, John McCain did not shy away from the cheap shot or the divisive argument; the palling-around-with-terrorists, Obama-as-socialist themes were not the elevated campaign that he, too, pledged to run.

I don't blame Obama for responding in kind as much as I bristle at his simultaneous posture that he is above that sort of gutter politics.

Well of course it's John McCain's fault and Obama must respond in kind.  But to her credit, Ms. Marcus is at least bright enough to figure out that Obama will govern as he campaigned -- in a rather standard Democratic fashion -- which means take no prisoners.

What evidence is there that a President Obama would govern differently than candidate Obama campaigned? Would a President Obama press policies -- on teacher accountability, on climate change, on trade -- that discomfit Democratic Party interest groups? Does he have the spine to stand up to the inevitably overreaching demands of congressional Democrats? Does he have some magical, Republican-whisperer ability to quell a political opposition that will be determined from Day One to frustrate his program and regain power?

Obama's closing argument offers reassuring words, undergirded by his evident instinct for consensus and pragmatism.

I know how he wants to govern. I'm not convinced he can pull it off.

Sorry Ruth.  You only think you know how Obama wants to govern.  What you know for a certainty is only how he says he wants to govern.  He's said a lot of things.  He could no more disown the Reverend Wright than he could his own grandmother -- then under the bus went the Reverend.  He pledged to accept public financing for his campaign -- but then his fund raising broke all records and his campaign was inundated with cash.  Sure, Ruth.  You know how he wants to govern.  Sure you do. 

Democrats' game plan for Iraq

Just a little reminder.  In the unfortunate event that they win a super majority in congress, this is what Obama and the Democrats have in mind for Iraq. 

Hypocrisy of the Democrats

In today's New York Post former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerrey, offers crocodile tears over the hypocrisy of Democrats on the issue of campaign finance reform.

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

The next time we speak of the virtue of level playing fields or state our strong belief that democracy can't survive in the modern age unless big money is taken out of campaigns, we'll be counting on our audience's forgetting our silence this year, when the free market was flowing in our direction.

A hypocrite is a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue - who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings. And that, it seems to me, is what we're doing now.

When it comes to hypocrisy, it might be quicker to point out where Democrats are not hypocrites... 

There.  I think I've covered all of them. 

Senator Kerrey closes,

So maybe I was simply wrong about placing limits on spending and providing public monies in exchange for adhering to these limits. Of course, it's possible that I'm making a virtue out of a necessity - since my candidate is now winning in part because, by opting out of the system, he has more money to spend.

In the short term, I'm sad to report that hypocrite is a more accurate label. In the long term, perhaps this will be the moment that causes me to change my views. It certainly feels better than remaining a hypocrite forever.

I doubt that it will take long for Senator Kerrey to come around.  Democratic purposes in supporting campaign finance reform were to counter a fund raising advantage traditionally held by Republicans.  Now that this election has demonstrated that such advantages can be overcome, I'm sure the Senator will rediscover the advantages of free speech.

Intransigence by the Democrats may be about to pay off

Throughout the Bush Presidency liberal Democrats maintained a disciplined unity, blocking confirmation votes on all but a handful of his judicial nominations.  As a result the federal appeals courts are ripe for takeover by leftist judges who will be inclined to interpret the constitution in accordance with current social justice fads.  All that remains is the election of a leftist president to nominate them.  That would be Barack Obama.  Steven G. Calabresi, co-founder of the Federalist Society and a professor of law at Northwestern University, writes:

On the Supreme Court, six of the current nine justices will be 70 years old or older on January 20, 2009. There is a widespread expectation that the next president could make four appointments in just his first term, with maybe two more in a second term. Here too we are poised for heavy change.

These numbers ought to raise serious concern because of Mr. Obama's extreme left-wing views about the role of judges. He believes -- and he is quite open about this -- that judges ought to decide cases in light of the empathy they ought to feel for the little guy in any lawsuit.

Speaking in July 2007 at a conference of Planned Parenthood, he said: "[W]e need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

On this view, plaintiffs should usually win against defendants in civil cases; criminals in cases against the police; consumers, employees and stockholders in suits brought against corporations; and citizens in suits brought against the government. Empathy, not justice, ought to be the mission of the federal courts, and the redistribution of wealth should be their mantra.

In a Sept. 6, 2001, interview with Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ-FM, Mr. Obama noted that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren "never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society," and "to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical."

He also noted that the Court "didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted." That is to say, he noted that the U.S. Constitution as written is only a guarantee of negative liberties from government -- and not an entitlement to a right to welfare or economic justice.

If elected Obama will take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.  But then he also pledged to accept public financing for his presidential campaign, and we know how that turned out.

Voter fraud

ACORN is under investigation in at least 14 states for filing thousands of bogus voter registrations, but the U.S. Department of Justice is apparently planning to look the other way, according to The Wall Street Journal.  U.S. attorneys charged with monitoring the vote are staunch supporters of Barack Obama.

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers recently sent two letters to Attorney General Michael Mukasey deploring a news leak that the FBI is investigating Acorn, and warning Justice to focus instead on "voter suppression." Barack Obama has also joined in this political intimidation, demanding in two letters that Mr. Mukasey appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Justice staff who he claims are engaged in "unlawful coordination" with John McCain's campaign to pursue "so-called 'election fraud.'" There is zero evidence that such coordination exists, but it is remarkable that a Presidential nominee would dismiss election fraud as a myth.

The lawyers at the Civil Rights Division are already falling into line. Justice recently decided to reverse a policy in place since 2002 to send criminal attorneys and other federal employees to monitor polling places. The decision came two weeks after a September meeting to which the Civil Rights Division invited dozens of left-wing activist groups to discuss voter "access" to the polls.

Justice has also failed to enter the fray in Ohio. As many as 200,000 new voter registrations in that state are suspect, yet Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is refusing to follow the 2002 Help America Vote Act that requires her to verify these registrations. The Ohio Republican Party sued Mrs. Brunner, but the Supreme Court said the GOP lacked standing. Justice does have standing -- it is charged with upholding that law -- but has ignored the fight. The Justice excuse is that it isn't appropriate to file litigation so close to Election Day.

Yet that hasn't stopped the Civil Rights Division this month from filing a lawsuit against Waller County, Texas, to correct alleged violations of the Voting Rights Act; a lawsuit against Vermont for failing to report accurately on overseas ballots; and an amicus brief in a case filed by a civil-rights group that is suing to stop the Georgia Secretary of State from complying with voter verification rules. Justice's election suits always seem to side with liberal priorities.

It doesn't help Justice's credibility that attorneys charged with supervising voting issues are avowed Barack Obama supporters. According to Federal Election Commission data, James Walsh, an attorney in the Civil Rights Division, has donated at least $300 to Mr. Obama. His boss, Mark Kappelhoff, has given $2,250 -- nearly the maximum. John Russ, also in Civil Rights, gave at least $600 to Mr. Obama.

People may remember when former Atorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned over the firing of eight federal attorneys, most of those prosecutors were dismissed because they were unwilling to prosecute cases of voter fraud.

The behind-the-scenes maneuvering to replace U.S. attorneys viewed as weak on voter fraud, from state Republican parties to the White House, is one element of a nationwide partisan brawl over voting rights in recent years. Ever since the contested 2000 presidential election, which ended in a Florida recount and intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court, both political parties have attempted to use election law to tip close contests to their advantage.

Through legislation and litigation, Republicans have pressed for voter-identification requirements and other rules to clamp down on what they assert is widespread fraud by ineligible voters. Starting early in the Bush administration, the Justice Department has emphasized increasing prosecutions of fraudulent voting.

Democrats counter that such fraud is rare and that GOP efforts are designed to suppress legitimate votes by minorities, the elderly and recent immigrants, who are likely to support Democratic candidates.

Things haven't changed much.  The Democrats will steal the election if they can. It's not as if they haven't tried before.

David Bellavia at George Washington University

David Bellavia, author of House to House, spoke to a group at George Washington University about the War on Terror and his experiences in Iraq.  Mr. Bellavia fought terrorists from all over the world in Iraq.

Via Blackfive.