Saul Alinsky And the Obama-SEIU Ideology

This is worth a read:

Alinsky citing reveals SEIU-Obama ideology

U.S. purposefully mismanaged by President Andy Stern

The 2008 election was aimed, as Barack Obama said, “to fundamentally change America.” The American people did not do their homework. They thought he believed in the original paradigm. They were intentionally misled, but this could have been prevented.

Ask the leaders of the Democratic party who Saul Alinsky is and you will likely get obfuscation. They will tell you Barack Obama spent three years teaching Alinsky’s philosophy and methods but he likely will not answer questions about Alinsky. Hillary Clinton wrote her college dissertation on Alinsky but you won’t likely get a peep out of her.

Bluntly put, Alinsky is opposed to freedom. He is an elitist. He believed in communism and atheism. The fundamental values, as stated at the beginning of this column, are seen by Alinsky as horrors that have created mass inequities and careless behavior. What makes Alinsky dangerous is that he is insidious.

Alinsky’s primary approach to politics is deceit. The ends justify the means. He would create a communist Utopia dominated by his friends but not through open and honest debate. Therefore, they disguise themselves as believers in the republic and democracy. Gaining control is objective No. 1. This was the beginning of their revolution. The goal, then, for Alinsky was “to take from the haves and give to the have-nots.”

Obama taught this. He “community organized” under this philosophy. He has surrounded himself with people of like mind. John Holdren, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Valerie Jarrett, and Van Jones are just a few of the core conspirators.

Alinsky knew the core beliefs of the American people. He knew they had to be deceived and manipulated. His opinion was they were too selfish to give up the America that was constructed by the founding fathers. His followers have taken over the Democratic Party although many Republicans also are participating in the movement under the guise of progressivism.

The change they want will fundamentally eliminate freedom, representative government, democracy, free enterprise, private ownership, individual responsibility and religious faith. I have no problem with them telling you that and putting it up for debate but they will not because they would be thrown out of office.

This strategy has been known since the late 1960s. Since they cannot challenge those positions successfully, the next best thing is to get into the current system through deceit. Tell people you are something you are not. Then destroy people’s belief in the system by destroying it from within. This is the strategy employed by the disciples of Alinsky.

Alinsky said, “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, nonchallenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”

(from news-herald.com)

Related video: Saul Alinsky takes the White House

One of the fundamental “disappointments” that independents – who have massively abandoned Obama and his agenda – have is that Obama misrepresented himself (i.e., he lied) about who he was and what he would be about if he were elected president.

Too many people did not see Obama’s anti-free market agenda (Obama’s demagoguery of banks, of car companies, of insurance companies, of the Chamber of Commerce, of Fox News, etc.) coming.  They should have seen it, and they would have had they paid better attention, or had the mainstream media attempted to do its constitutionally-appointed duty.  But now they are left fearful.  Now they and the businesses they work for are being inundated with fundamentally hostile attacks against business.  And as a result we are forced to live through a period in which fully 77% of investors view their president as “anti-business.”

People didn’t vote for that.  They were lied to.

At the same time, Obama has surrounded himself with openly Marxist advisers (see also here), which brings out the crystal-clear-in-hindsight fact that Obama’s long association with Marxist radicals such as Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, and Bill Ayers.

An American Thinker piece ties Obama’s relationship with the pedophile communist Frank Marshall Davis to an early indoctrination in the philosophy of Saul Alinsky.

You reveal yourself in whom you choose as friends.  And Obama revealed himself:

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”

To cite Dr. Raymond Stantz from Ghostbusters, I wouldn’t have touched these people with a ten meter cattle prod.  And few Americans would have.

SEIU union president Andy Stern, who has visited the White House more than anyone else since Obama was elected, offers this view of the world:

– “Because workers of the world unite, it’s not just a slogan anymore.”

– “We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

That is a radical agenda from a clearly Marxist worldview.  And how does Obama respond to this vision?

“Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate.  Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.”

“We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

In a frightening way.

And so people who understood Obama weren’t at all surprised that he would pick a manufacturing czar such as Ron Bloom who said:

Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, ’cause they’re convinced that there is a free lunch.

We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.”

If this agenda doesn’t terrify you, it is because you are ignorant.  Just take a look at the giant black hole that Illinois state union employees and their unsustainable benefit schemes have put the taxpayers in.  And that same black hole is probably in your state, too.

Unions – whether public or private sector – are breaking the back of this country.  They are breaking down our society.  They are fundamentally destroying our American way of life.

And they now have someone who is helping them do it in the White House.

You start throwing out radical names of dangerous people that Obama has been associated with and a pattern emerges:  the aforementioned Davis, Jeremiah Wright (see also here and here and here), Khalid al-Mansour (more here), Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers.  And you realize that Obama has been steeped in a profoundly Marxist worldview.  Obama isn’t stupid; he knows that the American people don’t want that ideology.  But no one can conceal his worldview completely.  Critical observers saw it clearly.

And they accurately understood what it would portend if he was elected president.

Obama underscores the self-concealment of his worldview in his book which bears its title in inspiration of a Jeremiah Wright sermon that described his view that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need” (The Audacity of Hope):

“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

A politician who has Obama’s ostensible verbal skills is, quite simply, not a “blank screen” unless he wants to be.

Obama did not want us to know who he was, because we would have rejected him as our leader if we knew.

The more we finally learn about who Obama really is and what he really wants to do, the less we are going to like it.

Rampant Democrat Corruption Extends To Most Powerful Leaders

Right now, three of the most powerful Democrats are documented corrupt scumbags.

Charles Rangel, Chairman of the powerful tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee is a tax cheat.  Chris Dodd, the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, took corrupt mortgage loans from a corrupt mortgage lender at the epicenter of the mortgage meltdown crisis.  Kent Conrad, the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, also took such loans.

These men are incredibly influential in the writing of laws and legislation that will absorb most of the economy under their power.  And they are corrupt.

We were entertained at the beginning of the Obama administration as it became painfully obvious that it was hard to find an honest Democrat who actually paid the taxes that they hypocritically wanted everyone else to pay.  Many fell by the wayside, but “Turbo Tax” Tim Geithner’s personal dishonesty in paying his taxes didn’t stand in the way of his being Obama’s choice to become the Treasury Secretary in charge of enforcing tax laws.

Let’s start with the man who writes your tax laws but doesn’t want to follow his own laws and pay his own taxes: Charles Rangel.

The man has all kinds of issues, such as selfishly and greedily taking rent-controlled property meant for poor people.  It’s hard to say which is worse, but don’t forget to consider what he did in buying pricey beachfront rental property and then refusing to pay taxes on his substantial income:

JULY 27, 2009, 4:28 P.M. ET

Morality and Charlie Rangel’s Taxes
It’s much easier to raise taxes if you don’t pay them.

Ever notice that those who endorse high taxes and those who actually pay them aren’t the same people? Consider the curious case of Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel, who is leading the charge for a new 5.4-percentage point income tax surcharge and recently called it “the moral thing to do.” About his own tax liability he seems less, well, fervent.

Exhibit A concerns a rental property Mr. Rangel purchased in 1987 at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. The rental income from that property ought to be substantial since it is a luxury beach-front villa and is more often than not rented out. But when the National Legal and Policy Center looked at Mr. Rangel’s House financial disclosure forms in August, it noted that his reported income looked suspiciously low. In 2004 and 2005, he reported no more than $5,000, and in 2006 and 2007 no income at all from the property.

The Congressman initially denied there was any unreported income. But reporters quickly showed that the villa is among the most desirable at Punta Cana and that it rents for $500 a night in the low season, and as much as $1,100 a night in peak season. Last year it was fully booked between December 15 and April 15.

Mr. Rangel soon admitted having failed to report rental income of $75,000 over the years. First he blamed his wife for the oversight because he said she was supposed to be managing the property. Then he blamed the language barrier. “Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish,” Mr. Rangel explained.

Mr. Rangel promised last fall to amend his tax returns, pay what is due and correct the information on his annual financial disclosure form. But the deadline for the 2008 filing was May 15 and as of last week he still had not filed. His press spokesman declined to answer questions about anything related to his ethics problems.

Besides not paying those pesky taxes, Mr. Rangel had other reasons for wanting to hide income. As the tenant of four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, the Congressman needed to keep his annual reported income below $175,000, lest he be ineligible as a hardship case for rent control. (He also used one of the apartments as an office in violation of rent-control rules, but that’s another story.)

Mr. Rangel said last fall that “I never had any idea that I got any income’’ from the villa. Try using that one the next time the IRS comes after you. Equally interesting is his claim that he didn’t know that the developer of the Dominican Republic villa had converted his $52,000 mortgage to an interest-free loan in 1990. That would seem to violate House rules on gifts, which say Members may only accept loans on “terms that are generally available to the public.” Try getting an interest-free loan from your banker.

The National Legal and Policy Center also says it has confirmed that Mr. Rangel owned a home in Washington from 1971-2000 and during that time claimed a “homestead” exemption that allowed him to save on his District of Columbia property taxes. However, the homestead exemption only applies to a principal residence, and the Washington home could not have qualified as such since Mr. Rangel’s rent-stabilized apartments in New York have the same requirement.

The House Ethics Committee is investigating Mr. Rangel on no fewer than six separate issues, including his failure to report the no-interest loan on his Punta Cana villa and his use of rent-stabilized apartments. It is also investigating his fund raising for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York. New York labor attorney Theodore Kheel, one of the principal owners of the Punta Cana resort, is an important donor to the Rangel Center.

All of this has previously appeared in print in one place or another, and we salute the reporters who did the leg work. We thought we’d summarize it now for readers who are confronted with the prospect of much higher tax bills, and who might like to know how a leading Democrat defines “moral” behavior when the taxes hit close to his homes.

Charlie Rangel is a man who has been patently dishonest for his entire public life.  Not that it matters to Democrats.  If you’re a Democrat, you can be caught red-handed with $90,000 of FBI bribe money in your freezer like William Jefferson and actually get re-elected the following year.

That leaves Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad (at least, for me today).

AP IMPACT: Dodd, Conrad told deals were sweetened

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer Larry Margasak, Associated Press Writer – Mon Jul 27, 9:52 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Despite their denials, influential Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd were told from the start they were getting VIP mortgage discounts from one of the nation’s largest lenders, the official who handled their loans has told Congress in secret testimony.

Both senators have said that at the time the mortgages were being written they didn’t know they were getting unique deals from Countrywide Financial Corp., the company that went on to lose billions of dollars on home loans to credit-strapped borrowers. Dodd still maintains he got no preferential treatment.

Dodd got two Countrywide mortgages in 2003, refinancing his home in Connecticut and another residence in Washington. Conrad’s two Countrywide mortgages in 2004 were for a beach house in Delaware and an eight-unit apartment building in Bismarck in his home state of North Dakota.

Robert Feinberg, who worked in Countrywide’s VIP section, told congressional investigators last month that the two senators were made aware that “who you know is basically how you’re coming in here.”

“You don’t say ‘no’ to the VIP,” Feinberg told Republican investigators for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to a transcript obtained by The Associated Press.

The next day, Feinberg testified before the Senate Ethics Committee, an indication the panel is actively investigating two of the chamber’s more powerful members:

• Dodd heads the Banking Committee and is a major player in two big areas: solving the housing foreclosure and financial crises and putting together an overhaul of the U.S. health care system. A five-term senator, he is in a tough fight for re-election in 2010, partly because of the controversy over his mortgages.

• Conrad chairs the Budget Committee. He, too, shares an important role in the health care debate, as well as on legislation to curb global warming.

Both senators were VIP borrowers in the program known as “friends of Angelo.” Angelo Mozilo was chief executive of Countrywide, which played a big part in the foreclosure crisis triggered by defaults on subprime loans. The Calabasas, Calif.-based company was bought last July by Bank of America Corp. for about $2.5 billion.

Mozilo has been charged with civil fraud and illegal insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He denies any wrongdoing.

Asked by a House Oversight investigator if Conrad, the North Dakota senator, “was aware that he was getting preferential treatment?” Feinberg answered: “Yes, he was aware.”

Referring to Dodd, the investigator asked:

“And do you know if during the course of your communications” with the senator or his wife “that you ever had an opportunity to share with them if they were getting special VIP treatment?”

“Yes, yes,” Feinberg replied. […]

Countrywide VIPs, Feinberg told the committees, received discounts on rates, fees and points. Dodd received a break when Countrywide counted both his Connecticut and Washington homes as primary owner-occupied residences — a fiction, according to Feinberg. Conrad received a type of commercial loan that he was told Countrywide didn’t offer.

“The simple fact that Angelo Mozilo and other high-ranking executives at Countrywide were personally making sure Mr. Feinberg handled their loans right, is proof in itself that the senators knew they were getting sweetheart deals,” said Feinberg’s principal attorney, Anthony Salerno.

Two internal Countrywide documents in Dodd’s case and one in Conrad’s appear to contradict their statements about what they knew about their VIP loans.

At his Feb. 2 news conference, Dodd said he knew he was in a VIP program but insisted he was told by Countrywide, “It was nothing more than enhanced customer service … being able to get a person on the phone instead of an automated operator.”

He insisted he didn’t receive special treatment. However, the assertion was at odds with two Countrywide documents entitled “Loan Policy Analysis” that Dodd allowed reporters to review the same day.

The documents had separate columns: one showing points “actl chrgd” Dodd — zero; and a second column showing “policy” was to charge .250 points on one loan and .375 points on the other. Another heading on the documents said “reasons for override.” A notation under that heading identified a Countrywide section that approved the policy change for Dodd.

Mortgage points, sometimes called loan origination fees, are upfront fees based on a percentage of the loan. Each point is equal to 1 percent of the loan. The higher the points the lower the interest rate.

Dodd said he obtained the Countrywide documents in 2008, to learn details of his mortgages.

In Conrad’s case, an e-mail from Feinberg to Mozilo indicates Feinberg informed Conrad that Countrywide had a residential loan limit of a four-unit building. Conrad sought to finance an eight-unit apartment building in Bismarck that he had bought from his brothers.

“I did advise him I would check with you first since our maximum is 4 units,” Feinberg said in an April 23, 2004, internal e-mail to Mozilo.

Mozilo responded the same day that Feinberg should speak to another Countrywide executive and “see if he can make an exception due to the fact that the borrower is a senator.”

Feinberg said in his deposition with House Oversight investigators last month that exceptions for the type of loan Conrad received were not allowed for borrowers outside the VIP system.

“If there was a regular customer calling, and of course you say, ‘No, we’re a residential lender. We cannot provide you with that service,'” Feinberg said.

Feinberg also told House investigators that Countrywide counted both of Dodd’s homes as primary residences.

“He was allowed to do both of those as owner-occupied, which is not allowed. You can only have one owner-occupied property. You can’t live in two properties at the same time,” he said.

Normally, Feinberg said, a second home could require more equity and could have a higher mortgage rate.

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the senior Republican on the House Oversight Committee, had his investigators question Feinberg as part of a broader investigation into Countrywide’s VIP program.

Other names that have surfaced as “friends” of Mozilo include James Johnson, a former head of Fannie Mae who later stepped down as an adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and Franklin Raines, who also headed Fannie Mae. Still other “friends” included retired athletes, a judge, a congressional aide and a newspaper executive.

Conrad initially said in June 2008, “If they did me a favor, they did it without my knowledge and without my requesting it.”

The next day, Conrad changed course after reviewing documents showing he got special treatment, and said he was donating $10,500 to charity and refinancing the loan on the apartment building with another lender. He also said then it appeared Countrywide had waived 1 point at closing on the beach house.

Gaddie said Feinberg has previously made statements to the news media that Countrywide waived 1 point without the senator’s knowledge.

Feinberg testified that VIPs usually were not told exactly how many points were being waived, but it was made clear to them that they were getting discounts.

And, of course, Barack Obama has his own sweetheart mortgage deal with his own scumbag, Tony Rezko.  Not to mention all kinds of other skeletons in his “Chicago Way” closet that were never investigated by a clearly biased press.  A lot of the most obvious corruption occurs through his wife Michelle Obama, who kept getting paid more and more on hospital boards as Obama advanced politically.  On hospitals that did some really nasty things, such as patient dumping which she might have participated in.

Democrats cry day after day that what the world needs is more government.

But consider something: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

No entity wields more absolute power, or is more corrupt, than government.

Democrats tell us every day that they are out to save us from evil big businesses.  But there is no one to save us from Democrats, or the intrusive giant octopus federal government behemoth they are seeking to create and empower to rule over virtually every aspect of our lives.

ABC Journalist Damns Whole Field Of Journalism Over “DANGEROUS” Bias

This is as powerful as it is frightening, coming from a fourth-generation journalist with ABC named Michael S. Malone.

ABC News
Media’s Presidential Bias and Decline
Columnist Michael Malone Looks at Slanted Election Coverage and the Reasons Why
Column By MICHAEL S. MALONE

Oct. 24, 2008 —

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game — with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I’ve found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I’ve begun — for the first time in my adult life — to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was “a writer,” because I couldn’t bring myself to admit to a stranger that I’m a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living — and when I knew her, scary — grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I’ve spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I’m deeply ashamed right now to be called a “journalist,” you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there’s always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word “said” — muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. — to influence the way a reader will comprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can’t achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty — especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the ’60s I saw a lot of subjective “New” Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from “real” reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I’d spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else’s work — not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I’d always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes — and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who’d managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation’s leading newspapers, many of whom I’d written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith — and I know the day and place where it happened — was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I’d already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNN would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I’ve seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass — no, make that shameless support — they’ve gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don’t have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather — not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake — but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far — such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain’s daughter’s MySpace friends — can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side — or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn’t Sen. Obama’s fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media’s fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven’t we seen an interview with Sen. Obama’s grad school drug dealer — when we know all about Mrs. McCain’s addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden’s endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn’t agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it’s because we don’t understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide — especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain’s. That’s what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I’m still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren’t those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don’t see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn’t; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you’ve spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you’re presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn’t have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you’ll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe — and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway — all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself — an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country…

PISS OFF THESE DISGRACES TO FAIRNESS AND TRUTH IN THE MEDIA; VOTE REPUBLICAN ON NOVEMBER 4!!!

I have been writing about the horrendous media bias – and how terribly destructive it is to democracy, and to the American political process – for some time.  My point has been: when the media – which has been charged with the Constitutional duty to keep the political process honest and fair – itself becomes the propaganda arm for one political party, it becomes impossible to sustain a democracy.  If the truth is misrepresented, or distorted, nor simply not reported, in the interests of advancing one particular political ideology, a fatal cancer is introduced in the democratic process.

We have seen the very likely death of two precious institutions during this campaign: 1) of the media’s integrity and honesty; and 2) of public campaign financing.

The media has stooped to misrepresentation, propaganda, demagoguery, and flat out lying, in order to elect Barack Obama for President.  And Barack Obama – in order to win election – abandoned his own promise to accept public campaign finance and – in the words of The Associated Press – “doomed” public finance.

What major candidate for President will ever again accept public funding if he realizes he might very well find himself or herself outgunned by a 4-1 margin by electing to do so?  Enter big money the likes the American political process has never before seen, thanks to one Barack Obama.

You can’t put either genie back into the bottle.  If media propaganda obtains its intended result, if massive campaign money obtains its intended result, both institutions are doomed forevermore.  And democracy itself is doomed along with them.

Experience: Where Sarah Palin Is Sorely Lacking

You may have heard that one or two liberals believe that Sarah Palin is “dangerously lacking” in certain essential features that would qualify her to be our next Vice President.

Peter from Dover, New Hampshire helped me to realize that Sarah Palin is lacking in a number of important experiences.  To many, this list is more than enough to disqualify her from high office:

1) You have probably heard about Sarah Palin’s baby born with Down Syndrome, her daughter who became pregnant at age 17, and maybe even about her son who is about deploy to Iraq as a U.S. Army infantryman.  Unfortunately,  Sarah Palin lacks a kid who lobbies her for sweetheart deals the way Joe Biden’s son lobbied him for the 2005 Bankruptcy law “overhaul” that has been recognized to be directly responsible for causing the foreclosure crisis that screwed hundreds of thousands of poor suckers out of their homes.

2) Sarah Palin is sadly lacking in terrorist friends who that helped her get her start in politics and wish they blew up more of the country like Barack’s friend William Ayers.

3) Sarah Palin – in spite of all hope to the contrary – is lacking in criminal friends who helped her buy a million dollar house amidst extremely suspicious circumstances and are on their way to jail like Tony Rezko.

4) Sarah Palin – in spite of her known religious beliefs – is lacking a reverend and long-time mentor who harbors profound racist prejudices and anti-American views like Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright.  If that isn’t bad enough, she chose to attend a church which worshipped Jesus rather than one that pursued radical Marxist theology and black separatism.

5) Sarah Palin is lacking a spouse who says he has never been proud of his country in his adult lifetime, says that America is downright mean and guided by fear, and says that Americans hold on to ignorance and stereotypes.

6) Particularly troubling for many liberals is the fact that Sarah Palin actually chose to keep a baby with Down Syndrome instead of leaving it in a storage closet to slowly die of neglect, as the Born Alive Infant Protection Act that Barack Obama voted against and would not allow to come up for a vote was written to prevent.

7) And what may be the worst of the worst – Sarah Palin is lacking a penis.  It is only appropriate to be a successful female politician if you are a Democrat, and only Hillary Clinton can run for the executive branch.  All Republican women desiring to make history must be destroyed by any means necessary.

For these and other reasons, Sarah Palin is clearly not qualified to run for Vice President according to Democrats.

It’s a shame, really.  I thought she would make a great VP.  But this lack of so many crucial experiences is simply devastating to her candidacy.

John McCain’s 7 Houses: Liberals, Nuance, and Hypocrisy

In the aftermath of the Rich Warren’s Saddleback debate, conservatives were greeted with a new catchphrase to encompass Barack Obama’s windy, cerebral, abstract answers: nuance. Barack Obama’s responses to revealed his “nuanced” understanding of a complex, difficult, ambiguous world.

And of course, conservatives are depicted as having only enough “nuance” to kill some poor helpless animal and drag its carcass back to the cave.

The Obama campaign is also involved in a daily complaint session about how the McCain campaign is constantly engaging in lowball politics and “gotcha” attacks while the ephemeral and pure Obama campaign pursues the higher and loftier things.

Well, bogus, and more bogus.

Both forms of “bogii” are revealed in the Obama campaigns handling of John McCain’s “house controversy.”  Aside from the fact that a guy who spent 5 1/2 years being tortured in a Communist hell hole DESERVES to have a life of luxury these days, there are a couple of factors that really turn this issue into another revealing glimpse into the shrivled soul of the Obama machine.

Get Listy summarizes the issue:

Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain was asked Wednesday by a reporter from Politico how many houses he owned. McCain wasn’t sure.“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain reportedly said in the interview in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama jumped on McCain’s statement and almost immediately turned it into a campaign attack. McCain’s camp responded with a responding attack, according to CBS News.

Well, here’s the deal: John McCain had a difficult time answering the Politico reporter’s question because the answer was NUANCED.

It turns out that wealthy heiress Cindy Hensley McCain – who keeps separate finances (there’s even a prenuptial agreement) owns most of the homes. Some of the houses they may not even technically own per se, as they are owned in trusts established by Cindy McCain’s LLC. [Click here for an investigation of the seven houses]. And John McCain didn’t want to get into the personal and murky issues as to what was owned by his wealthy heiress wife.

John McCain may not actually even own a home of his own.  The Obama slam has the merit of being technically correct, but how big of a deal is it with an understanding of the big picture?

Nuance.

That didn’t stop Barack Obama from personally jumping all over this. He’s stumping on it with speech after speech. His campaign immediately came out with an ad depicting McCain as so elitist and so out of touch that he doesn’t even know how many houses he’s bought.

Who’s the caveman now?

Which brings home the issue of hypocrisy.

Barack Obama will whine and complain about how unfair the McCain campaign is, and how they attack him with trivial side issues even as he simultaneously launches into a barrage of the very sort of thing he’s complaining about.

The McCain campaign, for it’s part, mentions Obama’s $4 million in income last year, and his shady million-plus dollar home bought in cahoots with convicted politician-buying sleazeball Tony Rezko and asks, “Does Obama really want to talk about elitism and real estate?”

Of course, Obama does.  The crime isn’t about owning seven houses.  The crime is rather about not immediately knowing how many houses you “technically” own.  You see, for a hypocrite like Barack Obama, appearance is the only thing that really matters.

Remember that the next time he whines about how he’s treated.

Obama Caught With Yet ANOTHER Radical Association

Obama keeps reaching back to his Chicago political past for his policy advisers, and pulling one despicable, vile, and even evil rabbit after another out of his hat.

The list of Barack Obama’s radical associations is long and it keeps getting longer. Some are now well-known, but many are not.

They need to be.

Oh, we know about Obama’s 23 years at Trinity United Church of Christ. And we know about Jeremiah Wright. These relationships alone were enough to prompt the leftist Rolling Stone Magazine to acknowledge that:

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr.

And of course, many have heard the name of Father Michael Pfleger and his hateful and race-hating ramblings (what do you call a white man who despises his own race? A liberal).

But many don’t realize that Barack Obama met the radical social activist Father Pfleger while Obama was carrying out his own radical social activism. They don’t realize that Barack Obama’s stint as a “community organizer” was at ACORN, about as radical an organization that one can find in America.

But you haven’t heard quite as much about James Meeks, the third of Obama’s three closest “spiritual advisor’s.” You can hear one of his “sermons” on Youtube.

We certainly could learn more about another of Barack Obama’s friends from Chicago, Penny Pritzker, who heads the Obama campaign’s National Finance Committee. We can look into her own financial background and learn that not only was she the president of Superior Bank – which massively failed; and not only did she literally personally buy her way out of jail by paying a $460 MILLION dollar “fine”; but that she was at the very epicenter of what would become known as “the subprime loan scandal” that would come to eat this nation’s financial system alive.

We could look at former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, former head of Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until it was discovered that he had benefited from sweetheart loans from subprime king Countrywide.

The name Tony Rezko certainly ought to sound familiar.

The name William Ayers, terrorist bomber, Obama-co-lecturer, fellow board member, neighbor, and friend should certainly come to mind.

We could also look at Barack Obama’s youthful associations and see just how radical and troubling they are:

Barack Obama has been steeped in radical politics since the day he emerged from his atheist secular humanist grad student mother’s womb. The openly communist Frank Marshall Davis was his childhood mentor; Saul Alinsky and Gerald Kellman (it was through Kellman’s Woods Fund that Obama met leftist terrorist William Ayers) dominated his thinking in college. He chose the most radical church in the country; he chose to make Jeremiah Wright his “spiritual mentor”; he chose to immerse himself in hard-core ideological radicalism. Never before has this country considered such a radical leftist for its chief executive.

Barack Obama’s own wife Michelle should have a LOT more explaining to do than her “and for the first time in my adult life I’m proud of my country,” her, “America is a mean place in 2008” comments. If that’s all you know about her “work,” you have no IDEA. The following short video is guaranteed to give you some “Oh, My God!” moments, or I’ll refund your money:

Now we find another Obama association that exposes a whole other ugly can of worms.

Chicago lawyer Mazen Asbahi, who was appointed as the national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign (if this link fails you will know that the Obama campaign is continuing to scrub its website) less than two weeks ago, stepped down Monday after an Internet newsletter wrote about his brief stint on the fund’s board – which also included a fundamentalist imam – prompting The Wall Street Journal to email inquiries. Asbahi attempted to make his brief time on a board the issue, when the real issues were his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, and his 8-year long personal relationship with Hamas fundraiser Jamal Said.

Gee, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama. If you really want people to forget that you are the son of a Muslim father who served an incredibly brutal and corrupt Kenyan government; if you want them to forget that you attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a child and even practiced Islam; if you want them to forget that you campaigned in Kenya on behalf of your cousin, Raila Odinga, who relied upon chaos, corruption, and even violence in his campaign; numerous other troubling associations between yourself and radical Muslims; forget those photographs of you waling around in traditional Muslim clothes, well then maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t hang around with Muslim radicals such as Mazen Asbahi and another radical pal of yours, the anti-Semite Rashid Khalidi.

It is frankly impossible for me to understand how Barack Obama managed to win the Democratic nomination. That so many Americans could care less about who their candidate really is – beyond the fact that he is the Democrat in the race – is simply amazing.