Posts filed under 'Democrats'
From NRO’s The Campaign Spot:
From the Chicago Sun-Times article on grants distributed by then-state-legislator Barack Obama.
(Records from 1997 to 2000 weren’t available.)
There’s a shock.
His state legislative office records may have been thrown out, he told us.
He’s never released a specific list of law clients, instead giving a list of all of his firm’s clients, numbering several hundred each year. His campaign will only confirm representation when the media comes to them with a specific case.
He won’t release his application to the state bar. He’s never released any legal or billing records to verify that he only did a few hours of work for a nonprofit tied to Tony Rezko.
He’s never released any medical records, just a one-page letter from his doctor.
Does it bother anyone that a guy with political ambitions for his entire adult life has not left a paper trail?
It does bother me…what is Obama hiding? The “Un-Named Democrat” made flesh, that is what he is - the problem is that we don’t need an International Man of Mystery as President of the United States…especially one connected with racists, anti-Americans, corrupt wheeler-dealers and the odd terrorist or two.
Tags: Barack Obama, liberal lies
July 18th, 2008
From Victor Davis Hanson:
Our 21st-century paralysis is surprising. The United States is not materially exhausted. We sit atop trillions of dollars worth of untapped oil, gas, coal, shale and tar sands.
America could mine more uranium, and reprocess fuels to build hundreds of nuclear plants. American agriculture is blessed with the world’s best soils, most developed irrigation systems, and most productive and astute farmers.
There is as much sun and wind in the western United States as anywhere in the world. We have plenty of natural resources and the know-how to make all the wood, steel and cement products we need.
A new, hungrier generation of Americans will have to want to reclaim our pre-eminence and change the national attitude. It must be ready to pay off generations of debt rather than borrow, build rather than sue, and drill rather than whine.
It’s time to honor rather than avoid and outsource physical labor. Our children are healthy enough to cut our own lawns and pick our fruit. Let’s also hope they want to hear a lot more about Gen. David Petraeus’ success, and a lot less of Madonna’s latest psychodramas.
But just as importantly, what Americans need now is leadership to get moving again — rather than more platitudes about hope, squabbling about race and gender, and endless rhetoric about who is really a maverick or a true conservative or the most liberal. What we need to know from our two presidential candidates are specifics about how to jumpstart America.
So, how many more barrels of oil, refineries and megawatts will America produce –and when and how? How much debt will the next administration retire — and when and how. How and when will our schools return to knowledge-based rather than the present (and failing) therapeutic curriculum?
Americans, in short, should be tired of hearing that we are a post-industrial, postmodern, post-anything society. Instead, we want to be known again as a can-do producer nation that sweats as much as it thinks. And the confident presidential candidate who can best assure us of that will surely win this election.
My answer, naturally, is that McCain is the better man to do these things - and, indeed, McCain has been tacking towards a new understanding of American strength, and the real point of American conservatism (it isn’t just a powerful military and low taxes - those are incidental to conservatism, not central). While there is a rank foolishness in Democratic class war rhetoric (especially when at least a plurality of the rich back the Democrats - and its probably an absolute majority), no conservative can view corporate America with anything other than dismay at the way they’ve made of mess of things in housing, automobiles and finance. We’ve been so busy, on the right, fighting the War on Terrorism and fighting off socialism that we’ve forgot that a two by four needs, at times, to be directed at corporate America, too. All conservatives, schooled as we are in understanding the inherent weakness of large bureaucracies, should understand almost instinctively that a large corporate bureaucracy is only slightly better than a large government bureaucracy.
It is time for us to really get America moving again - a comprehensive insistence that government get out of the way, but corporations be held to the highest possible standards of honesty; an insistence that the lawsuits stop; a demand that NIMBYism on things like oil drilling and refineries be slammed hard; a realistic approach which gathers our immense strength and applies it to our pressing problems. And, most importantly, a rigid defense of the family - against intrusive government bureaucrats and corrupt teacher’s unions, to be sure, but also against corporate greed which views the family 14 year old as a prime target for sex and violence marketing.
Its all of a piece - for many decades we were focused on defeating the USSR. Lately we’ve been concentrating on the War on Terrorism - but its does us no good to win the war abroad only to lose it at home. What America needs, from top to bottom, is conservatism - conservative economics, conservative morals, conservative government. McCain may be the man to do it, but Obama is definitely not the man for the hour. This is no time for intra-movement fights over alleged purity, but it is the time to fight it out on each issue for what is really best for America - conservatism.
Tags: John McCain, political ideology
July 18th, 2008
Last month it was projected that Barack Obama would raise $100 million.
Well, he raised more like half of that
Yet, curiously enough, Obama’s campaign is misleading potential donors by misrepresenting the combined fundraising numbers of McCain and GOP vs. the Obama camp and the DNC.
This morning, the Obama campaign fired off an emotionally-tinged fundraising email to their supporters. The urgent message stated:
“The Obama campaign and the DNC ended June with a combined total of nearly $72 million in the bank. It’s a healthy number. But McCain and the RNC together still have a huge cash advantage, and we need your help to close the gap.
As I mentioned in my video message to you earlier in the week, we’re facing a Republican machine with unprecedented resources at its disposal. The McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee finished June with nearly $100 million in the bank.”
(Emphasis theirs).
… But in an under-stated blog post, Politico’s Ben Smith informs us that the Obama campaign’s math was off by $20 million:
“In total, the Democrats have some $92 million on hand, to the combined Republican total of $95 million.”
(The Obama email said they only had $72 million — now we find out they have $92 million).
First the Obama campaign operates their own Orwellian Ministry of Truth, now they’re trying to tell us that 2 + 2 = 5.
But, why would Obama want to mislead his supporters like that?
Of course, the cynical observation is that Obama’s campaign wanted to fire-up their supporters by pretending as if they were losing the money game to the GOP. Remember, Hillary’s donors didn’t come to her rescue until they knew she really needed it (when she invested $5 million of her own money.) The point is that political donors are more likely to become emotionally involved if they believe they are needed — and that their candidate is in danger of being beaten — so there was an incentive for Obama to play-up the disparity.
But a less sinister — and more charitable — analysis is that their math was off by $20 million. Of couse, this would be a gross error for such a polished political operation to commit.
But, par for the course for someone like Barack Obama.
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: And while $52 million might seem a hefty sum, it doesn’t work too well when you burned through $42 million at the same time…and you’ve eschewed public financing, which means that you’re money has to last all the way to November. Obama is said to be getting together 2,000 paid staffers…five times what President Bush had in 2004…the guy must already think that he’s President.
Tags: Barack Obama, fundraising, liberal lies
July 17th, 2008
The MSM sycophants follow Obama overseas, proving they are the most miserable of lap dogs:
Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.
But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.
And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party.
The extraordinary coverage of Obama’s trip reflects how the candidate remains an object of (slavish deovotion) in the news media…(report edited for clarity)
This may backfire - its clear that we’re going to get an “all Obama, all the time” fest in the MSM while he globtrots to places he doesn’t know about to look into issues he’s ignorant of…and that opens up the prospect of both people noticing that Obama was resoundingly wrong about Iraq and, additionally, people getting turned off by fawning media coverage. On the other hand, these MSM heavyweights migth be going so that they can carefully edit Obama on-scene to prevent the gaffe machine from really blowing it overseas…
Tags: Barack Obama, media bias
July 17th, 2008
Rob at Say Anything brought my attention to Michelle Obama’s criticism of the the recent economic stimulus checks that went out, since $600 apparently can only buy you a pair of earrings.
Amanda Carpenter adds to this
She made these remarks at a “working women’s roundtable discussion.”
Although Mrs. Obama has been praised by fashionable outlets like Vogue magazine for her sense of style, her comments about $600 earrings reinforces an unflattering image of the Ivy-league educated Obama lawyers. They’ve both been called “elitist” several times though the course of the presidential campaign season.
Mr. Obama’s former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton called him at “elitist” for telling donors at a private fundraiser in San Francisco that “bitter” Americans in places like Pennsylvania “cling to guns or religion.”
I recently got my stimulus check, and ended up using it very quickly to purchase a number of things. It certainly helped, but more tax cuts would help even more.
Tags: elitists, Michelle Obama
July 16th, 2008
Can’t say it any clearer than this:
Over the last year, Senator Obama and I were part of a great debate about the war in Iraq. Both of us agreed the Bush administration had pursued a failed strategy there and that we had to change course. Where Senator Obama and I disagreed, fundamentally, was what course we should take. I called for a comprehensive new strategy — a surge of troops and counterinsurgency to win the war. Senator Obama disagreed. He opposed the surge, predicted it would increase sectarian violence, and called for our troops to retreat as quickly as possible.
Today we know Senator Obama was wrong. The surge has succeeded. And because of its success, the next President will inherit a situation in Iraq in which America’s enemies are on the run, and our soldiers are beginning to come home. Senator Obama is departing soon on a trip abroad that will include a fact-finding mission to Iraq and Afghanistan. And I note that he is speaking today about his plans for Iraq and Afghanistan before he has even left, before he has talked to General Petraeus, before he has seen the progress in Iraq, and before he has set foot in Afghanistan for the first time. In my experience, fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: first you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy…
…In wartime, judgment and experience matter. In a time of war, the commander-in-chief doesn’t get a learning curve. If I have that privilege, I will bring to the job many years of military and political experience; experience that gave me the judgment necessary to make the right call in Iraq a year and half ago. I supported the surge because I believed it was our only realistic chance to reverse the disaster our previous strategy had caused, and the right thing to do for our country. And although events have proven me right, my position wasn’t popular at the time, and I risked my own political ambitions when I took it. When I tell you, I will put our country’s interests — your interests — before party; before any special interest; before my own interests, every hour of every day I’m in office, you can believe me. Because for my entire adult life, in war and peace, nothing has ever been more important to me than the se curity and well-being of the country I love. Thank you.
Obama was wrong about the surge - there is no way around that. More than his being wrong, however, there is now his rank dishonesty - his claims that he didn’t say the surge would fail, his Orwellian excising of his old Iraq position from his website, his attempts to spin himself into an architect of victory when he was singing the siren song of defeatism for the past 18 months. A dishonest man who can’t come up with the right solution - this is not the sort of man we want as President.
John McCain promises us that he’ll put country before everything - and we have the absolute proof that he’ll do that. He really did jump out in front of nearly everyone - including the President - in advocating one of the most unpopular acts our government has ever undertaken, and it worked…and our nation, and the world, is better off for it. All honor to those who saw the way clearly - and let us leave those who wanted to surrender in the dark recesses of our national memory, not elevated to the most powerful office in the world.
Tags: Barack Obama, Defeaticrats, Iraq, John McCain, liberal lies, Troop Surge
July 16th, 2008
Pretty stark:
A new Gallup Poll claims to show that registered voters who say religion is important in their lives tend to support presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain by a margin of 50 to 40 percent, while those who say religion is unimportant to their lives tend to support presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama by a margin of 55 to 36 percent.
About two-thirds of the registered voters surveyed by Gallup said that religion is important to them.
According to the Gallup Poll, which surveyed 95,000 registered voters from March through June 2008, the divide in voting preference is not confined to white Protestants but is manifested among non-Hispanic white Catholics as well.
Non-Hispanic white Catholics who say religion is important in their daily lives support McCain over Obama by 53 percent to 37 percent. Those who say religion is not important slightly favor Obama by a margin of 47 percent to 45 percent.
Hispanic Catholics, black non-Catholic Christians, and those who do not have a specific religious identity reportedly tend to support Barack Obama, but their support apparently is little affected by the importance of religion in their lives.
Hispanic Catholics who say religion is important in their lives support Obama over McCain 57 to 31, while those who say religion is not important support Obama by a margin of 63 to 30 percent.
Meanwhile, among the 12% of respondents who have no religious identity, Obama cleans up with 65% to McCain’s 26%. Obama will, of course, try to move some religious voters his way; McCain, meanwhile, will try to expand his appeal to religious voters…and the election may very well turn on just who shows up…believers, or unbelievers.
There is a sad note in this, however - we are, in many ways, a house divided against itself, just as we were in the 1850’s - and just as it was back then, we will not forever remain divided, but will become all one thing, or all the other. Our fervent hope, of course, is that the passions which divide us never lead us to view those who disagree as our enemies.
This election may settle a lot of things, one way or the other - an Obama Presidency would cement ultra-liberal control of the judiciary while the Obama plan to massively increase government may place such a large number of Americans on government dependency (in one form or another) that we’ll have an European style electorate wedded to welfare and unwilling - even at the cost of national destruction - to modify their demands. On the other hand, the election of McCain will cement a conservative majority in the judiciary, while McCain’s proposals to reign in government spending and end pork would get government further out of Americans’ lives, and thus retain in America that sense of independence which is one of the two mainstays of our national strength (the other is our continued strong religious belief, especially as relative to the rest of the western world).
It is a crucial election, and pettifogging complaints that the candidate isn’t pure on ideology are worse than stupid - for each side, to stand aside is to give up the fight, perhaps for good and all.
Tags: Barack Obama, John McCain, Polls, religious voters
July 16th, 2008
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