Inevitable that this connection would come out – from Legal Insurrection:

…The “Chief Economist to Vice President Joe Biden” was none other than Journalista Jared Bernstein, who — thanks to a post at Volokh Conspiracy (via Instapundit)– I just learned was an adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008 when he was active on the Journolist:

One question that has arisen in the last week is how closely JournoList members, not only discussed how to shape the news to advance the fortunes of Barack Obama, but coordinated with the Obama campaign. Jared Bernstein’s position as an unpaid adviser and surrogate shows that there was at least one direct link between JournoList and the Obama campaign.

In attendance for the meeting at the White House were fellow Journolistas Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress), Tim Fernholz (American Prospect) and Chris Hayes (The Nation). One of the other bloggers in attendance was Oliver Willis, whose name has not surfaced on the Journolist, but who works for Media Matters, so he is practically an Honorary Journolista…

I used to think, “well, we know there was coordination between the Obama people and the MSM, but its not like they’re stupid enough to have anything we can use as proof”. Well, whom the gods would destroy they do, indeed, make mad…and incredibly stupid.

I guess they got sloppy – also, I figure they thought that once they won, they had won forever. No going back from another 60 years of liberal dominance, as it were. The scam only had to last until election day – and then the glories of liberalism would finally convince those idiot, bitter bible- and gun-clingers to give up their allegiance to the GOP. It hasn’t quite worked out like that.

The lesson here is that nothing coming out of the MSM as it relates to anything political (in the remotest sense) can be considered reliable. This is not to say that no truth will come out, but that anything reported or commented in the MSM needs to be taken as provisional until confirmed by at least one non-MSM source. In the MSM, they want liberals to win – all the time and everywhere. They will lie and cheat to achieve liberal victory. Only when liberal victory is not at stake can their reports be taken at face value.

Ed Driscoll notes how the media attempted to control the Jeremiah Wright story during the 2008 campaign:

At the Daily Caller, Jonathan Strong rummages through the JournoList and describes how documents from mid-2008 “show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright:”

It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign…

…Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage...

The Jeremiah Wright story should have finished Obama’s campaign. There was no way around the fact that Wright is a racist and an anti-American and that Obama was exceptionally close to him for 20 years. To turn it about, had a Republican been discovered in as close accord with a white, racist pastor, that would be all she wrote…the MSM would have been all over it, and Republicans would have turned in fury on the miscreant. But that is not what happens when a liberal Democrat is involved.

As soon as Obama emerged out of the morass of the early primaries and caucuses, it became a firm desire on the part of the MSM that Obama be elected President. Who he was or what he was actually about was irrelevant – he’s black and has impeccable liberal credentials. That is all that mattered – and, indeed, all that still matters in the MSM. In their view, it was a requirement that America elect Obama, and nothing was going to be allowed to stand in the way of this consummation. Certainly not something as minor as the truth.

When the Wright story could no longer be entirely suppressed, it became necessary to control the damage, and that is just what the MSM did. Obama’s speech on race – was used a pivot; once that was done, the MSM just relentlessly hit upon the theme that the story was over; Wright was done and was no longer relevant.

And this is what the MSM will always do with a threatened liberal. They don’t care about truth; they don’t care about America; they don’t care about the people…all they care about is that their world view be validated by liberal politicians running the show. Keep that in mind as you watch their coverage of any story – at the back of it will always be the coordinated message to protect the left.

From Fox News:

The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes…

It was clear, early on, that Democrats were doing a replay in Minnesota of what they had done in 2004 in Washington – a close race with the Democrat slightly behind, and they just kept finding votes until they had enough to put the Democrat slightly over the top. They also tried this in Florida in 2000, and failed.

The preservation of our democratic way of governance requires absolute security of the vote – there must never be even the slightest shadow of the doubt that the person holding the seat won it fairly. Right now, there is no such certainty in the 2008 Minnesota result and the only recourse is for the Senate to expel Franken and thus allow the people of Minnesota to use their constitutional means of selecting a Senator to legitimately hold the seat.

A new, fair ballot would be the best means – even if it ends up returning Franken to serve out the rest of his term (though he should be thoroughly investigated to ensure he did nothing criminal as regards the 2008 vote). This is not a small issue; this is not just politics as usual – this is the viability of a government of, by and for the people. It doesn’t take many fraudulent elections before all of them are mere criminal conspiracies. We must do the right thing here.

That is the amount of money people at Goldman Sachs lavished on President Obama for political campaigns. Will President Obama return the money?

After all, back when Abramoff scandal broke, Democrats were demanding that every dime even remotely connected to Abrahmoff activities be returned – isn’t turn about fair play?

True, that demand died down when it emerged that Democrats were major beneficiaries of Abramoff donations, but isn’t this just a great time for Democrats to live up to their own alleged standards?

Read it and weep, Democrats:

As he prepared to take a job in the White House at the end of last year, David Axelrod sold the political consulting firm that helped elect President Barack Obama for $2 million to a group of consultants who helped steer Obama’s campaign.

According to a disclosure form released Friday evening by the White House, the firm, AKP&D Message & Media, paid him $897,000 last year, when it had basically turned itself into an arm of the Obama campaign, which paid the company $2.5 million.

The disclosure indicates that Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe — the “P” in AKP&D and still an influential political consultant for Obama and the Democratic National Committee — was not among the buyers, though he’ll remain a senior adviser to the firm.

Instead, Axelrod reported the new owner is a “newly formed S corporation” owned by Obama campaign vets John Kupper, John Del Cecato and Larry Grisolano.

Kupper and Del Cecato — the “K” and “D,” respectively — handled research and for the campaign and also wrote many of its ads. Grisolano is a Los Angeles-based strategist who handled direct mail for Obama’s campaign.

This is a new day in Washington? This is something other than business as usual? This is open, honest government which only speaks for the people?

I’m telling ya, liberals, you’ve been taken for suckers – Obama might be a leftist, but those who elevated him to power did it for the money and the power, and now they are running the show behind the scenes while Obama reads the script off a teleprompter.

You’ve been had – wake up!

It is nice to see that Minnesotans are not about to allow the sleazebag politics of the Democratic party to hijack a Senate seat without a fight:

Minnesota voters testified Tuesday their ballots had been unfairly rejected as Republican Norm Coleman argued thousands of disqualified absentee ballots should be counted in the U.S. Senate race.

“Perhaps my signature is not as good as it once was,” Gerald Anderson, of St. Paul, told the three-judge panel hearing Coleman’s lawsuit. “It gets cloudy and crooked. I am 75 years old.”

But that shouldn’t have disqualified his vote, he said: “I want it back. I’m entitled to my vote.”

A statewide recount gave Democrat Al Franken a 225-vote edge. The personal stories that Anderson and five other voters told are just one front on Coleman’s effort to have more votes counted.

And so much for “count every vote” – that only applies when Democrats are behind. Once the Democrat gets in the lead, then all the votes are counted, no matter what.

Has there been a more disgusting spectacle out of the 2008 campaign? Here is Al Franken, the man who routinely accuses Republicans of being lying bastards, attempting to steal a Senate seat he couldn’t win on the square…how do liberals sleep at night?

Barack Obama was not one to hold back on doom & gloom characterizations of the economy, so why is it that only now he’s saying all the hope and change he promised will have to be scaled back?

[Comrade] Barack Obama said reviving the U.S. economy will require scaling back on his campaign promises and personal sacrifice from all Americans.

“I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace we had hoped,” Obama said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” program broadcast this morning. “Everybody’s going to have to give.”

Obama also said in the interview recorded yesterday that he wants stricter guidelines and greater transparency in spending the remaining $350 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. 

It is amazing how different campaign promises are from reality… especially for Barack Hussein Obama. His “hope and change” is looking a lot more like “nope and more of the same.”  It seems like we’re hearing a lot of preemptive excuses being given to explain why Obama is ultimately going to be a huge failure.

We’ve just seen how Democrats in power have turned a legitimate Republican victory for Norm Coleman into a stolen election for Al Franken… so this ought to be a warning to the Republican Party that they have to do a lot more to fight the Democrats attempts to steal elections across the country.

The highly publicized vote recount in the Minnesota Senate race between Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman is shining a light on Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the state’s chief election officer.

Ritchie is chairman of the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which on Monday certified that Franken received 225 more votes than Coleman did.

Ritchie gave partial credit for his 2006 election to a liberal 527 group, the Secretary of State Project, which says its goal is to “ensure fair, clean elections” by replacing conservative secretaries of state with liberal Democrats.

 “I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grassroots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top,” Ritchie said in a posting on the project’s Web site. “Your wonderful support–both directly to my campaign and through generous expenditures by the strategic fund–helped me get our election reform message to Minnesota voters.”

 The SoS Project says it spent a total of $500,000 in seven swing states in 2006 trying to get Democrats elected as secretaries of state. They achieved victories in all but two of those states–Michigan and Colorado–but helped fund Democratic wins in Ohio, Nevada, Minnesota, Iowa and New Mexico.

This blatant attempt to steal elections must be stopped.

In Tennessee, at least:

On Election Night, voters spoke loudly with the echoes reverberating still today. In Tennessee, John McCain carried the state with 57% of the vote, Senator Lamar Alexander was re-elected with 65%, and fourteen new Republican legislators were elected yielding a Republican Majority in the General Assembly for the first time since 1868.

Voters elected legislators that carried the same values and principles that are held by average citizen in these districts. Those values and principles are pretty simple.

* Taxes and spending: The government should live within its means and oppose higher tax bills to fund a bloated budget; the voters know government needs to cut spending.
* Gun Rights: Voters want commonsense carry laws making it easier for them to protect themselves and their families.
* Local economies: Families in their community know that improvements are needed by investing in transportation and education infrastructure to support existing jobs and recruit new businesses. They are tired of the powerbrokers in Nashville increasing entitlement programs instead.

Candidates, who displayed the courage to challenge Democrat incumbents and in open seats were solid, qualified individuals. They were not just “known” in their communities. They are people that truly represent the values of their communities.

We believe this is what our founders intended with citizen legislators. The hard work and time commitment that is necessary to run campaigns are a good test of how hard each legislator will work for his or her district. The people of these districts will be well represented by their new representative’s principled leadership.

But it should be noted that Alexander out performed McCain by 8 percentage points – and had McCain jazzed up GOPers as much as he should have, we might have had a different result nationally.

The Tennessee GOP showed how its done – in an anti-GOP year with arguably the most unpopular GOPer ever in the White House, the Tennessee GOP clobbered the Tennessee Democrats. We have to get back to our roots, and back to the people – the left talks a great game about being for the people, but what they are really for is themselves…and for too long now, too many GOPers have aped this attitude, and now we’ve paid the price for it, and very deservedly.

It will be a long, hard road back to national power and it may even take a decade or two to complete (though I do think we have bright prospects for 2010), but it is a road we must travel for the sake of the nation. Liberalism, that dead dog of the past, will have its day – and it’ll be our job to ensure that it is the very last day liberalism ever has.

The recount in Minnesota has been a bizarre roller coaster, with Team Franken finding new ways to steal the election. Coleman has had a slim, but regular… yet Franken’s finagling. including mystery ballots being discovered in bizarre places.

Recent reports have Fraudulent Franken up… but it is far from over.

But major issues remain in the race, including some 5,000 withdrawn challenges that won’t be allocated to the candidates until next week. Coleman’s attorney, Tony Trimble, said those could throw the lead back to the Republican.

“We’ll let them enjoy the weekend,” Trimble said. When votes from those challenges are restored, he said, “You’ll see our ship come in.”

There’s reason for him to be optimistic. Franken withdrew more challenges before this week, leaving a larger pool of potential votes for Coleman in the next stage. There are 400 to 500 more ballots where Coleman could find votes compared with the batch available to Franken.

Al Franken is trying to steal this election… Help Coleman fend off Franken’s Fraud by donating here.

It’s about time.

Political newcomer Anh “Joseph” Cao, a Republican, has beaten nine-term incumbent William Jefferson, a Democrat, in the 2nd Congressional District, according to the Associated Press.

With 79 percent of the district’s 492 precincts reporting, Cao, a Venetian Isles attorney who has enjoyed strong backing from local and national GOP organizations, is leading 53 percent to 43 percent over Jefferson. Green Party candidate Malik Rahim has 3 percent, while Libertarian Gregory Kahn is trailing with less than 1 percent.

The district, which was drawn to give African Americans an electoral advantage, covers most of New Orleans, most of Jefferson Parish’s West Bank and parts of south Kenner. About two-thirds of the district’s voters are registered as Democrats.

It is a good day when a corrupt Democrat finally gets defeated… one down… a lot more to go.
Next up… trial and conviction.

I think a celebratory glass of Cabernet Sauvignon is in order.

UPDATE: How sweet it is.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Also noted is that the Democrats seem to have lost the other runoff House election in Louisiana. The reason does appear to be lower-than-necessary black turnout – one wonders that now there’s a black man to be in the White House will black turnout drop off heavily for all the special and off-year elections? For the 2010 mid-terms? The test will be in next year’s Virginia governors race.

Despite an enormous amount of help from Comrade Obama, Georgia Democrat Jim Martin was handily defeated by Senator Saxby Chambliss.

And despite attempts by Al Franken to steal his election, it looks like Norm Coleman will be returning to the Senate as well.

The runoff between Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin – Real Clear Politics aggregate of recent polls has Chambliss up by 4.7 points. All in all, it looks like the GOP will pull out a win here, though we must work hard – this could end up being the 41st GOP Senator.

As a side note, after our crushing defeat in 1992, it was Georgia’s Senate race which signaled the turn of the tide – coming hard on our defeat, it ushered in a period of victory which culminated in the 1994 mid-terms. History doesn’t actually repeat itself, but lets get a victory in Georgia and hope its an omen of our resurgence.

To help out Senator Chambliss who, with Franken still trying to steal Minnesota, may be all there is between liberty and 60 Democratic Senators:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will come to Georgia next week to campaign for incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss on the eve of the runoff election.

Palin, who drew large crowds while running for vice president with Republican presidential candidate U.S. Sen. John McCain, will appear at Chambliss rallies in Augusta, Savannah, Perry and Atlanta on Monday, the day before the Dec. 2 senate runoff between Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.

A Chambliss victory following hard upon a Palin visit will make Governor Palin a top draw as we head towards 2010, and thus give her a massive leg up for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Scary.

More from Zogby:

 Just 2% of voters who supported Barack Obama on Election Day obtained perfect or near-perfect scores on a post election test which gauged their knowledge of statements and scandals associated with the presidential tickets during the campaign, a new Zogby International telephone poll shows.

Zogby Statement on Ziegler poll.

Only 54% of Obama voters were able to answer at least half or more of the questions correctly.

The 12-question, multiple-choice survey found questions regarding statements linked to Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice-presidential running-mate Sarah Palin were far more likely to be answered correctly by Obama voters than questions about statements associated with Obama and Vice-President–Elect Joe Biden. The telephone survey of 512 Obama voters nationwide was conducted Nov. 13-15, 2008, and carries a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points. The survey was commissioned by John Ziegler, author of The Death of Free Speech, producer of the recently released film “Blocking the Path to 9/11″ and producer of the upcoming documentary film, Media Malpractice..

And of course there is a lot more at HowObamaGotElected.com.

Interesting:

In her seminal book, The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel writes about the real political divide — not left versus right, but what she calls stasists versus dynamists. The former fear change and want to use government power to minimize it, if not eliminate it. The latter accept that improvements in the human condition require change by definition, and understand that the best way to ensure it is to allow individuals the freedom to make choices, with consequences, both good and ill, to be borne by them.

By these definitions, both presidential candidates in this election were largely stasists.

Can’t say that I agree with that, but is in a fascinating concept – fascinating, to me, in the indicator of how widespread sheer misunderstanding is in our modern world. We’ve been far too long on this road, and its time we got off it.

As a campaign theme, “change” worked great for Obama. In reality, of course, Obama proposes very little of the change he ostensibly campaigned on, but we are in for some radical changes that were little mentioned during the election (we will get, for instance, a lot more abortion funding out of Obama even though that wasn’t mentioned on the campaign trail, but we won’t get a major shift in Iraq policy, even though Obama was on and on about it). Please observe one thing about the late, unlamented Presidential campaign – neither candidate talked about doing what is right. Curiously enough, I happened to hear Ralph Nader just before election day and in his own kooky but sincere way, he was talking about doing what was right, as he saw it. His tiny vote total can be taken as an indicator of what always trying to do the right thing can do to you, at times.

Change is a word which masks what is really going on – an attempt to avoid the hard and fast, “this is right or this is wrong” of it all. And don’t get me wrong here; John McCain is as guilty on this score as Obama. The jury is out on President Bush, and may not come in for a century. Former President Clinton is the archetype of the leader who will change daily in order to avoid doing what is right and thus risky. Taking one thing with another, we’ve had only a few President’s who were determined to do what was right all or most of the time. Reagan was one; so was Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and, of course, George Washington.

This is not to say that these men made no mistakes – each of them has a large number of rather stunning mistakes in the performance of their office. But the key to all of them was their burning desire to do what was right and the unflinching way they adhered to what was right, as best as they could determine it. And if you think we’re poor in having so few such leaders, please observe that in the entire rest of the world in the entirety of human history, the number of leaders who also tried to do what was right is, perhaps, even less than we’ve had in our 225-odd years. St Louis of France, for certain. Confucious, though he wasn’t in charge. Ashoka of India. Mandela. Christina Alexandra of Sweden, perhaps. Not much, to be sure.

To fault Obama and McCain for not doing what most people don’t do is unfair. On the other hand, to call for perish-the-hindmost change at all costs is insane. What we want is leaders who will try to discover the right thing to do, and then go on and try to do it, come what may. If doing the right thing calls for the complete overturning of a particular institution, then we must do it. If doing the right thing calls for rigid adherence to the existing rules of an institution, then we must do it. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and if you’re not actively seeking to do the right thing, then you run a high risk of doing the wrong thing, even if unintentionally.

That is the word.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer, it would seem.

This is the part of politics most people shouldn’t have to see – Obama wants Hillary neutralized, at least for the first couple years, and by putting her in the Cabinet, he gets that. Hillary, meanwhile, has a lot of debts to pay off and the only want to get the money is via Bill’s “speaking fees”, and he will now have influence to peddle with this “foundation”. Actually, I’m going to hand it to Obama on this one – rather clever, if cynical, political ploy.

The larger worry I’m developing is that Obama appears unwilling to make a decision which risks Obama’s political prospects. In the advancement and defense of Obama, Obama is quick and decisive…on everything else he floats around like a feather blown on the wind. The various parts of the Obama Administration may fly very much out of control – someone has to make hard and fast decisions, and if Obama won’t, other’s will – to the detriment of national policy. Honestly, its better to have a series of wrong decisions made than a series of correct half-decisions.

Obama has a steep learning curve, and for the sake of the United States and the world I hope he realizes (a) how little he knows and (b) is determined to master his job.

John Hawkins makes a strong argument in favor of removing Senator Mitch McConnell from his Senate Minority Leader post, and that is part of a larger debate in the conservative movement about what moves we should make early on in our rebuilding process. My view? All Congressional GOP leaders should voluntarily step aside and allow new people to compete for their posts.

When you are the leaders of the losing team, propriety dictates a humble recognition that the failure, ultimately, rests in the leadership. Yeah, the cards were stacked against the GOP. Certainly, McCain didn’t run the ideal campaign. The MSM was in the tank for the Democratic party. On and on – there are plenty of mitigating circumstances. And they all amount to nothing – the GOP lost.

I didn’t hear a clarion call from the GOP as to just why we should elect GOPers to the House and Senate. I know we were low on money in a lot of respects, but I saw huge numbers of GOP ads attacking Congressional liberals…which is a fine thing to do, but you can’t beat something with nothing. You can’t just be against Congressional liberals (wise as that position is) you also have to be for something…and the GOP had a host of things to be for which a good, national campaign could have highlighted:

1. Oil and energy – the GOP made some good moves in this, but I never saw a comprehensive, national campaign to highlight just how bad the Democrats are on this issue and the common-sense solutions the GOP had in hand.

2. Taxation – no talk at all about how a variety of tax cuts could be used to stem the financial crisis and restore economic growth.

3. Corruption – Stevens should have been stripped of all his GOP privileges the moment he was convicted and every GOPer in America should have loudly called for his immediate resignation. Couple this with the Democrats continued coddling of people like William “Cold Cash” Jefferson and the GOP could have made fighting corruption an issue for the GOP.

4. Spending – Why didn’t we pledge ourselves to fiscal responsibility? A “we learned our lesson” campaign could have at least started returning GOP favorability in matters of spending.

Others can probably thing of many more things we could have used to go on offense – but all I perceive from the GOP in 2008, as in 2006, is a determination to limit losses…in other words, to not lose as badly as we could. Douglas MacArthur was asked what his formula was for defensive warfare – his one word answer, “defeat”. You can’t win unless you attack – and we didn’t lunge after Democratic vulnerabilities.

It might have been that the ultimate course for 2008 was GOP defeat – perhaps the anti-GOP headwinds really were too strong to overcome by even the best candidate and the best campaign. So be it – but you go into any battle with the absolute conviction of total victory and fight like heck from start to finish. We didn’t do that – our leadership didn’t do that; and it is time for them to go.

The very long fuse of the Catholic Church has finally gone off over this criminal enterprise:

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) has not yet been able to determine if grants made to ACORN were used for fraudulent voter registration, but has cut off all funding to the community organizing group, Bishop Robert Morin announced on Tuesday.

Shortly after addressing the full assembly of U.S. Catholic bishops, Bishop Morin spoke to reporters about what the bishops had learned concerning the use of grants from the CCHD to the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which is currently under investigation in 13 states for voter fraud.

CCHD originally announced in July 2008 that it was suspending funding to ACORN because of the embezzlement of 1 million dollars by the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. Today, however, the Bishop Morin went one step further and announced the cancelation of all funding to the group.

The Catholic Church will work with just about anyone if there’s a chance the poor will be helped – recognizing the truth that we all fall very far short of the perfection God desires for us, its not time to stand on ceremony when a sinner offers to help out. But there is a limit, and ACORN has at least reached it. Hopefully the good people in ACORN will start to realize that they’ve been taken for a ride by a group dedicated to fraud and a leftist political ideology which is at war with all morality.

So, The One announces that if you’re a lobbyists you can’t work on the transition – this is supposed to give us all a tingle up our legs as we believe that, finally!, government will be cleaned up…

But, meanwhile, we still haven’t got a valid explanation from Obama about just why the security precautions were taken of his internet donation link and just where did all that money really come from? We know some came from non-existent people and some from foreigners…anyone want to take bets on some of it coming from lobbyists via third-party cut-outs?

Obama, if you want us to believe you’re really going to change how DC does business, then call for a special prosecutor to look into all campaign fundraising in 2008. We’ll be fair – we’ll have the GOP looked at, too.

After all, Democrats, there is nothing to fear from a full airing of just who donated to whom, right?