Its about time that the decent people of this nation started hitting back:

Troopergate Investigator Stephen Branchflower has been slapped with two lawsuits, one by a group of Alaskan residents who believe his inquiry represents an abuse of their tax dollars and the other by five Republican lawmakers who called Branchflower’s tactics “McCarthyistic.”

Both suits were filed at the Third Judicial District in Anchorage on Tuesday.

Citizens Robert Bettishworth, James Dodson, Seth Church, David Eichler, Thomas Temple and Alan Simmons complained the $100,000 allocated to determine whether Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin abused her power in firing of a political appointee is “a statutorily unauthorized waste of public monies.”

The citizen suit raised doubts about Branchflower’s neutrality, citing public statements from the investigator’s “Project Director” Democratic Sen. Hollis French.

French, who is actively supporting Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, handpicked Branchflower to conduct an investigation to determine whether Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin violated ethics rules in firing Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan. French has publicly said he expects Branchflower’s inquiry to culminate in an “October surprise” that would hurt Palin’s chances of becoming vice president in November.

Their suit specifically detailed an exchange Branchflower had with Alaskan lawmakers during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Friday. “Branchflower admitted that not only did Senator French actually remove a name from Branchflower’s subpoena list, but that he was not sure why French had done that,” their suit said. “When asked specifically about the removal of the name, Branchflower stated that he ‘would have to defer that question to Mr. French,’ thus admitting that the investigation was under the de facto control and direction of Senator French.”

Its just a political hatchet job – slime politics at its worst; the sort of thing which makes the left’s treatment of Bush look tame. Mostly, however, this is just all too typical leftwing politics – using a smear as means of undercutting the appeal of people who are better qualified, more honest and who actually plan to fight for the people.

In older times we would arrange for a poltroon like French to have a stripe or two laid on his back – treating him in accordance with his dirty dog tactics. But we’re more refined, now – and French has a bright future in Democratic politics, especially if his smear were to work. Democratic leaders only calculate a person’s worth by how much they help advance Democrats to power – questions of honesty, dignity and basic human decency don’t take a back seat to other considerations – for Democratic leaders, such concerns don’t even exist.

Why? Because it is what liberals do – and Rush Limbaugh is always a convenient target, as the MSM will never rise to his defense:

We’ve been doing a little research here, ladies and gentlemen, on this Obama Spanish language ad quoting me. It’s a TV ad that they quote me as saying a couple things, an ad running in New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado. One of the things they quote me as saying is, “Shut your mouth or get out.” And what they’re doing in this ad is tying me to McCain, saying that the Republicans are two-faced on immigration and so forth. While McCain is out there saying he loves illegal immigrants and wants to welcome them, the real Republicans like me are saying, shut your mouth or get out. Now, what’s interesting, I never said that. Even in the heat of the amnesty battle, I never said shut your mouth or get out, even in the middle of those protests. What we have learned is that the usual suspects are behind this. The Media Matters types, the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting types, they are the people putting together Obama ads. Obama’s new, right? Obama’s into unity, Obama’s into change, he’s using the same old Democrat Party flacks, the same hacks. The statement you’re a foreigner, shut your mouth and get out, was made, I did say it, but in a parody of Mexican immigration laws in a Morning Update April 6th of 2006.

We were making fun of Mexican immigration laws by trying to point out the stark difference between what you can do as an immigrant or illegal immigrant in Mexico versus what they can do here…

…It happens constantly when they want to link me, the left, constantly take me totally out of context, knowingly doing so. We can even go back, we could probably post on the website the Dittocam version of this Morning Update from April 6 of 2006 to prove it. Well, we don’t need to prove it, but here. I’m reciting Mexican immigration law: You’re a foreigner, shut your mouth or get out. The Obama campaign has taken “shut your mouth or get out” from this commentary and put it in an Obama ad and claiming I said that about Mexicans in this country, when I never have, plain and simple. Also, what is the other quote they have me saying? I don’t have it in front of me. Stupid and unskilled Mexicans. That was way back in 1994 from the NAFTA debate, and I was chiding Americans — remember, I was pro-NAFTA — I was chiding Americans for being afraid of losing the kind of jobs that would go to an unskilled workforce. I was referring to the stupid and unskilled workers in this country, too, as a sales pitch for NAFTA, don’t worry about these kind of jobs, they’re jobs you won’t do anyway, is what I said back in 1994. And both of these things have been taken out of context on purpose…

What Obama wants is for hispanics to hate Republicans – doesn’t matter that McCain has a long pro-immigrant history, doesn’t matter that Rush never said the things Obama claims…all that matters is that hate be created and made to fester, because Obama feels this will help him with hispanic voters in November. I recall ads out here in Nevada from Obama just prior to the caucuses which absurdly claimed Hillary was anti-hispanic – in other words, this race-baiting is not something new from Obama, but is a tactic the Obama campaign appears to rely upon.

This is change? This is hope? No, this is just typical leftwing fear- and hate-mongering in the service of advancing leftwing power.

And without a massive charge to the taxpayers or media hoopla about a messianic speech in Berlin:

Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin will meet with foreign leaders next week at the United Nations, a move to boost her foreign-policy credentials, a Republican strategist said.

Republican candidate John McCain plans to introduce the Alaska governor to heads of state at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, although specific names weren’t yet firmed up. “The meetings will give her some exposure and experience with foreign leaders,” the strategist said. “It’s a great idea.”

McCain and Palin are expected to visit the U.N. on Tuesday, when President George W. Bush will address the international body.

Since her nomination, Palin has energized the Republican base, drawn huge crowds and propelled fund-raising. However, Democrats have attacked her as weak on foreign policy experience. Even on last week’s “Saturday Night Live,” actress Tina Fey spoofed Palin’s assertion that she is familiar with issues involving Russia, noting that Alaska is nearby. “I can see Russia from my house!” Fey-as-Palin said.

But McCain advisers hope her U.N. visit will show how quickly Palin can make key connections and become well-versed in foreign-policy issues.

In my view, meeting foreign leaders is over-rated – once upon a time, a US President simply wouldn’t leave the United States during his term; diplomacy was handled by diplomats. Treaties were worked out in consultation between diplomats and the President and once agreed to they were submitted to the Senate for ratification. It all worked pretty well – and as varied meetings, at varied times, between Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hilter, Josef Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman produced pretty much nothing but disaster, I can assert with some strength that direct meetings between leaders cause more problems than they solve. In counter balance to this, we have the meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev….but the chances that the level of wisdom in those two men would be duplicated elsewhere by others is rather slim, even with the best of intentions.

But Governor Palin will meet some – and it will at least give her a grounding in the sort people she’ll have to deal with in global affairs. It will also give her at least as much foreign policy experience as Obama, who has nothing but the aforementioned trip to Europe a couple months ago on his foreign policy resume’.

Oddly enough, the headline here is, “Watchdogs Gird for Election Day Troubles” – which means that the author is either amazingly ignorant of voter fraud in the United States, or a mere shill for the left:

Election Protection, a nonpartisan voting-rights coalition, plans to launch on Wednesday an expanded voter-services program, including a hotline and Web site for citizens to report voting problems and get information about election procedures.

In 2004, Election Protection received more than 200,000 phone calls. It’s expecting more this year and has set up 25 call centers to respond. For this year’s elections, it subscribed to a private database that can answer questions such as whether hotline callers are registered to vote, what times their polling places are open and whether they need to bring identification. In the weeks leading up to Election Day and on it — Nov. 4 — its volunteers will report trends in complaints to local election officials.

The group revamped its Web site so that voters can report problems and chat online with volunteers. Election Protection also will have footage on its Web site from a group called Video the Vote, which documents snafus at polling places.

On Nov. 4, Election Protection will send about 10,000 lawyers and law students to polling places around the country, in swing states such as Ohio and Florida as well as in states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, where there are many minority and Spanish-language voters.

“This year we have so many new voters, who are more likely to be disenfranchised,” says Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington. The lawyers’ committee is the lead legal partner for Election Protection, whose members include law firms and organizations such as the NAACP, Rock the Vote and the Asian American Justice Center.

These people will be around to gather bogus stories of disenfranchisement and, as necessary, file suits to keep polls open long enough for Democrats to find out how many more votes they need to tip a State’s electoral votes to Obama. They’ll probably also make themselves useful as intimidators of any pettifogging precinct worker who dares to in any way, shape or form question the bona fides of someone showing up to vote. You think I’m kidding? Then I remind you that Democrats, themselves, pulled this sort of stunt in Missouri in 2000, only to run afoul of the fact that their alleged plaintiff had been dead for some time by election day. Better to have allegedly independent groups file the complaints – they can make certain the plaintiffs are alive and, also, provide the MSM with the ability to straight-faced megaphone whatever the group decides to accuse the GOP of on election day.

As has been truly said, they can’t cheat if we don’t allow it to be close – in 2004, we managed to wrack up several million more votes than the Democrats and that made it impossible for them to manufacture enough votes to take the election. If the 2008 result boils down to a few thousand votes in one or more States, then this effort will go gangbusters to muddy the waters and manufacture votes for Obama. So, our task is to help McCain win pretty big – by at least more than a million votes nationwide and preferrably by a comfortable margin in each crucial battleground State. If we do win on November 4th, we can expect the Democrats to be as ungracious as they were on election day 2004, but we can take their petulance a lot better if we know that we’ve preserved honesty in American elections.

The weird world of liberal politics:

The Obama campaign and Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit in federal court today, alleging that the Michigan Republican Party is engaging an illegal effort to disenfranchise voters.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call, Obama general counsel Bob Bauer said they filed the injunction after evidence surfaced that the Michigan GOP planned to use home foreclosure lists to keep voters still using the address of their foreclosed home from voting. Such voters could be challenged at voting precincts and forced to answer questions or risk being denied voting rights…

…One piece of evidence the plaintiffs will cite is an article published by Michigan Messenger, a reportedly left-leaning, political news website, which interviewed Macomb County GOP chairman James Carabelli and quoted him saying: “We will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.”

In an interview with the Detroit News the day after that quote was published, Carabelli denied the accuracy of the quote. “I never said anything even close to that,” he told the newspaper. “We won’t be doing voter challenges on foreclosures, and we’ve never had a plan to do it.”…

This is probably a pre-emptive move to prevent the GOP from fighting voter fraud in Michigan – with polls showing a tight race for Michigan’s electoral votes, the Democrats will need to score a huge number of Obama votes in the Detroit area…and given past Democratic pratice, we can reasonably assume that voter fraud is part of the Democratic plan. And so – find something (even if you have to make it up) to file a lawsuit against the GOP about, and then find a friendly judge who will bar or otherwise hamper GOP efforts to prevent voter fraud. Par for the course in modern Democratic/leftwing politics.

As for the source of the story – from what I’ve been able to determine, Michigan Messenger is an effort of a group called the Center for Independent Media, which adheres to the very absurd leftwing meme that the MSM has a conservative bias. Its a pinko group, of that we can be sure, and thus anything they say about the GOP has to be taken which a few metric tons of salt.

And it doesn’t matter if McCain or Obama is in the White House, we’ll still go at this hammer and tongs:

n the Holy See Press Office this morning, the presentation took place of an upcoming international conference entitled: “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species'”. The conference is due to be held in Rome from 3 to 7 March 2009.

The congress has been jointly organised by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, U.S.A., under the patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture and as part of the STOQ Project (Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest).

That will be a lot of fun.

From NRO’s The Corner:

My favorite part of the clip linked below, by the way, of Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood last year, is not about the kindergarten issue but this little gem from Obama, as the audience giggles:

The one thing that I want to insist on is that, as I travel around the country, the American people are a decent people. Now they get confused sometimes. You know, they listen to the wrong talk radio shows or watch the wrong TV networks, um, but they’re, they’re basically decent, they’re basically sound.

Gee thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Senator – I was thinking that I and all I know and love were rather creepy. Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Byron York over at NRO gives a great run-down on the whole issue of the “sex ed” bill and Obama’s claims that it was merely about preventing sexual abuse of children. The whole thing is a must read, but this part here – in and of itself – demonstrates that McCain is telling the truth, and Obama is incorrect about what was in the bill:

The second purpose was to increase the number of children receiving sex education. Illinois’ existing law required the teaching of sex education and AIDS prevention in grades six through twelve. The old law read:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades 6 through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention, transmission and spread of AIDS.

Senate Bill 99 struck out grade six, changing it to kindergarten, in addition to making a few other changes in wording. It read:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV. (emphasis added)

On can try to spin this as much as one likes, but the bill clearly provided for sex education for kindergarten – including instruction in how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases. You can’t have even the most basic instruction on how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases unless you familiarize your audience with the varied sex acts. Period. End of story.

Now, as to why I say McCain is telling the truth while Obama is mistaken – I’m giving Obama the benefit of the doubt. My bet is that Obama didn’t even read the bill – it was backed by various leftwing groups with a lead role for Planned Parenthood and one thing we know about Planned Parenthood is that when it says “jump”, liberal Democrats say “how high?”. Liberals, you see, genuinely believe that Planned Parenthood is a good organization – that it was founded by a racist eugenicist and is America’s largest abortion provider (and thus has a vested interest in as much sexual activity as possible) is not something that they think unimportant but is, instead, very likely something they don’t know – and are uninterested in knowing.

For all I know, Obama really believes that the bill he supported was about preventing child abuse – it might be what Planned Parenthood told him in order to get him to sign on to the bill. Given Obama’s well known wariness about putting his name on anything controversial, the best way to get him to back such a bill was to tell him it was about something as non-controversial as preventing child abuse – had the bill’s sponsors told him it was about extending sex ed to kindergarten, Obama would have likely voted “present”, as he did when so many other controversial bills came up for a vote.

The end result of all this is yet another reason to keep Obama out of the White House – it is clear that he’s not interested in being well informed on what is going on and, furthermore, this is a strong indicator that any liberal group which comes along will be able to get him to sign off on just about anything, no matter how absurd and/or destructive.

A powerful ad directed at Obama’s opposition to “born alive” legislation which would protect those children who are lucky enough to survive abortion.

Victor Davis Hanson notes:

The hallowed NBC brand of old is now devolved into MSNBC’s Matthews-Olbermann embarrassment. The once revered Atlantic Monthly now hosts blogger Andrew Sullivan trafficking in rumors that Gov. Palin’s daughter really delivered her Down Syndrome child, and then hires an unhinged photographer (best known previously for making children cry to make political statements) who brags post facto that she tried to subvert her own cover photos of McCain, before posting creepy photo-shopped out-takes of him on her website. To read a NY Times columnist is to be told ad nauseam that Gov. Palin is a bumpkin hockey mom. Whether an US magazine cover picture of Palin, or the Washington Post’s recycling old stories about Cindy McCain, the result is always the same: a concerted effort to ensure an Obama election.

The university crowd weighs in with op-eds warning us about white rural culture and the toxic landscapes that raised Sarah Palin, or why she is a counterfeit woman who piggybacked on the heroic work of pro-abortion pioneers. Every day another Hollywood dimwit—a Matt Damon, Lindsay Lohan, or Chevy Chase—attacks Palin or McCain in a fashion as crude as it is half-educated and incoherent.

Is it that hard to see, then, why McCain is dead-even or ahead—even when the incumbent Republican brand is suffering by association to war, economic uncertainty, and now financial meltdown?

There is a growing public anger at the petty amateurish biases of those who claim they are sophisticated and subtle; and it is not just that they sympathize with a smeared Palin, but are angry that the media thinks they are so stupid not to catch on.

Its still too early to determine if yesterday’s stock market drop will have an effect on the election – though I really can’t see too many people going, “well, well, well – I was going to vote McCain/Palin, but since the stock market dropped 500 points I see that Obama/Biden is the way to go”. Other than that small quibble, Hanson is dead on here – and he goes on to note that it appears the MSM and the overall liberal/left can’t stop themselves, even though at least some of them are starting to realize that their actions are harming Obama more than McCain. Why should it be like this?

Because lies are much, much easier to get along with than truth is. The fact of truth being difficult is something that has come up of late in my RCIA classes (look it up); we note that the more we walk towards the truth, the harder the steps can be – the payoff is the fact that one feels amazingly better once acclimated to the truth but getting there – and especially the first few steps – is very difficult. Here’s a small sample.

Have you seen those people on the street who are filthy and begging for money? Conservatives call them bums and liberals call them homeless – and conservatives hold that we don’t want to encourage them in their homelessness by passing out cash while liberals hold we must provide government aid for them even though this tends to merely provide a support system for being a full-time and long-term bum. Both sides are not actually confronting the truth – they are people, and they need help from people…not cold indifference, and not a government program. Help from people. That’s it – but, and here’s the hard part about the truth, “people” includes you, right now – or, more accurately, the next time you see such a person…you are supposed to go help them, immediately and with no thought for yourself. Much easier to either pass by without stopping, congratulating yourself on not contributing to the problem or, alternately, blaming “the system” and figuring that a good, old liberal Democratic Administration will fix things up. Truth is hard – you have to do something; untruth is easy – you don’t have to do anything. Curious how truth works – two different men I know, touched by truth, did the very same act separated by a year and with no knowledge of the other’s act…each of them, confronted with the filthy person, just went over and helped.

To get back to the subject at hand – liberals look at McCain and Palin and see a standing challenge to their world view. A false world view – a view in which pundit, newscaster and “community organizer” are more worthy than mother, business owner and servicemember. A dose of truth and the pundit, newscaster and “community organizer” will have to humbly admit that they aren’t really doing the important work of our society and, indeed, they are actually a rather un-necessary froth on the body politic of the United States – in other words, in strict truth, we don’t need to have a single pundit, newscaster or community organizer, but we won’t get anywhere without mothers, business owners and servicemembers. Liberals, taking a long, hard look at McCain and Palin can admit the truth of the matter, or they can opt for a continual lie about the true state of affairs…and, as I said, the lie is a lot easier to deal with than the truth. So, off they go getting more and more nasty – and more and more strange – every day in their attacks on McCain and Palin, all the while having less and less effect on mothers, business owners and servicemembers who will actually, in the end, decide who gets to be President.