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Karl Rove, OnlineWSJ.com

 

There has been an explosion of polls this presidential election. Through yesterday, there have been 728 national polls with head-to-head matchups of the candidates, 215 in October alone. In 2004, there were just 239 matchup polls, with 67 of those in October. At this rate, there may be almost as many national polls in October of 2008 as there were during the entire year in 2004.

 

Some polls are sponsored by reputable news organizations, others by publicity-eager universities or polling firms on the make. None have the scientific precision we imagine.

 

Polls can reveal underlying or emerging trends and help campaigns decide where to focus. The danger is that commentators use them to declare a race over before the votes are in. This can demoralize the underdog's supporters, depressing turnout. I know that from experience. Read article.

 

Andrew C. McCarthy

 

There should no longer be any dispute that Barack Obama’s aim is to socialize the American economy — as he vaporously puts it, to bring about “redistributive change.” The real question is how he’ll go about it. Very likely, the answer lies in a potentially cataclysmic treaty that has gotten virtually no attention during the campaign: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

 

To rewind, Obama expressly endorsed “redistributive change” in a 2001 Chicago Public Radio interview. Lamenting that the Warren Court (the tribunal that spawned a revolution in criminals’ rights) “wasn’t that radical” after all, Obama sought to prove his point by citing the justices’ failure to take on “the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.”

 

It was an early iteration of the socialist philosophy Obama recently made famous in an exchange with Joe Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber.” Of course on the latter occasion, when Obama spoke of planning to “spread the wealth around,” it was a slip. The candidate is far more guarded now than he was in 2001, just as he was more coy in 2001 than in his mid-Nineties incarnation — when he first sought to represent an extremely left-wing district and embraced his endorsement by the radical Chicago New Party (ACORN’s electoral arm with ties to the Socialist International).

 

By 2001, as he eyed national office, Obama put on mainstream airs. He couched his radicalism in soothing euphemisms. “Economic justice,” however, is simply the finance angle of “social justice,” the idée fixe of Obama and his coven of Change-agents — like Michael Klonsky, the communist educator who ran a “social justice” blog on Obama’s official campaign website. Read article.

Thomas Sowell, JWR.com

 

Some elections are routine, some are important and some are historic. If Senator John McCain wins this election, it will probably go down in history as routine. But if Senator Barack Obama wins, it is more likely to be historic— and catastrophic.

 

Once the election is over, the glittering generalities of rhetoric and style will mean nothing. Everything will depend on performance in facing huge challenges, domestic and foreign.

 

Performance is where Barack Obama has nothing to show for his political career, either in Illinois or in Washington.

 

Policies that he proposes under the banner of "change" are almost all policies that have been tried repeatedly in other countries— and failed repeatedly in other countries.

 

Politicians telling businesses how to operate? That's been tried in countries around the world, especially during the second half of the 20th century. It has failed so often and so badly that even socialist and communist governments were freeing up their markets by the end of the century.

 

None of this can be prevented by glib talk, but only by character, courage and decisive actions— none of which Barack Obama has ever demonstrated. Read article.

Thomas Sowell, NRO.com

 

One of the biggest and most long-lasting “change” to expect if Barack Obama becomes president of the United States is in the kinds of federal judges he appoints. These include Supreme Court justices, as well as other federal justices all across the country, all of whom will have lifetime tenure.

 

Sen. Obama has stated very clearly what kinds of Supreme Court justices he wants — those with “the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.”

 

Like so many things that Obama says, it may sound nice if you don’t stop and think — and chilling if you do stop and think. Do we really want judges who decide cases based on who you are, rather than on the facts and the law?

 

If the case involves a white man versus a black woman, should the judge decide that case differently than if both litigants are of the same race or sex?

 

The kind of criteria that Barack Obama promotes could have gotten three young men at Duke University sent to prison for a crime that neither they nor anybody else committed. Read article.

 

Independent View.com

 

Senator Barack Obama compared post-World War II America with Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a 2001 discussion of the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). While Jim Crow and all that went with segregation of African-Americans is a bloody stain on our national history, comparing those acts to the genocide of the Holocaust is an insult to the people of the United States and reflects, at best, a seriously flawed understanding of history.

 

In the January 18, 2001, Chicago Public Radio conversation hosted by Gretchen Helfrich entitled The Court and Civil Rights, Obama was joined by Dennis Hutchinson and Susan Bandes. The apparent focus of the discussion was the balance between the how far the Supreme Court would intervene and the content of the court’s decisions.

 

Just the previous year, Nation of Islam leader Minister Farrakhan was reported in the New York Times saying “that although the Holocaust was wrong, blacks had suffered “100 times worse” than the Jews.” For Minister Farrakhan, this was the American Holocaust of African Enslavement. In this context, it is not surprising that Barack Obama who worked with Minister Farrakhan and shared mutual friends, himself chose to make the comparison of Nazi Germany to the United States.

 

My point here is not to debate whether Jim Crow and segregation is comparable with the Nazi’s and the Holocaust. Both were evil and should be remembered as such. But slavery was not about exterminating the tribes of Africa. It was a system of economic exploitation. The Holocaust, by contrast, involved elements of slavery (e.g., forced labor) but included the systematic extermination of Jews. More than 6,000,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. It didn’t stop with the Jews, by the time it was over more than 11,000,000 fell victim to the Nazis. Read article.

 

Daniel Pipes.org

 

Barack Obama appears to have personally benefited from funds originating in Saddam Hussein's regime. It's a complicated connection, but one that deserves the consideration of Americans voters.

 

Two similar figures, Nadhmi Auchi and Antoin S. "Tony" Rezko, served as the intermediaries. Both are Middle Eastern males of Catholic Christian heritage who left Baathist dictatorships for Western cities (Auchi from Iraq to London, Rezko from Syria to Chicago). Both became successful businessmen who hobnobbed with politicians and promoted Arab interests. Both have been convicted of taking kickbacks and both stand accused of other shady dealings.

 

Auchi, born in 1937, is the more successful. When young, he joined Saddam in the Baath Party. He founded his main financial instrument, the General Mediterranean Holding SA in 1979 – revealingly, while still in Iraq. A year later, he emigrated to the United Kingdom. GMHSA now describes itself as a diverse group of 120 companies with consolidated assets of over US$4.2 billion. The Sunday Times (London) recently estimated Auchi's personal wealth at £2.15 billion, making him the 27th richest person in Britain. He garnered many honors along the way.

 

On the dark side, a French court in 2003 convicted Auchi of taking kickbacks in the Elf Affair and handed down a suspended jail sentence and fine. Read article.

 

Jonathan Rosenblum, JWR.com

 

Senator Barack Obama represents a third foreign policy approach — what Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington calls the "cosmopolitan." Far from taking American virtue as its starting point, the cosmopolitan seeks to remake America in Europe's image.

 

Thus Senator Obama presented himself to Europeans last summer as a citizen of the world, one of them. "Mr. Obama," in the words of Fouad Ajami, "proceeds from the notion of American guilt. We called up the furies ... ." He accepts the Western European critique of America's aggressiveness, and seeks to restore American "moral standing" in the eyes of the world.

 

He shares the Europeans contempt for the terminology of good and evil: "A lot of evil's been perpetuated based on the claim that we were fighting evil," he says. If his heart thrilled at the sight of Iraqis twice braving suicide bombers to go the polls, he kept it to himself. The war in Iraq, in his view, was nothing more than a "cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors ... to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the cost in lives lost and in hardships born."

 

And he expresses understanding of the grievances for the perpetrators of evil — Hamas, Hizbullah, even the perpetrators of 9/11, which he characteristically portrayed as part of "an underlying struggle between worlds of plenty and worlds of want" (despite the affluent backgrounds of the attackers). He voted against a Senate bill to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

The LA Times apparently doesn't think Americans are entitled to see Obama praising a terrorist mouthpiece before they decide whether to make him president for four years. Similarly, major news outlets buried this week's story of Obama calling for "major redistributive change" in a newly discovered 2001 radio interview.

 

But if you think we've got an unholy alliance between liberal Democrats in Washington and this country's media elite now, just watch what happens if Obama becomes president with a Democratic Congress — especially if it features a filibuster-proof Senate.

 

Major Democratic congressional leaders like Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois, 2004 presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want the reinstitution of the outdated, pre-Internet "Fairness Doctrine." They want to counter the news revolution in which blogs and talk radio have taken on the Big Three TV networks.

 

This measure is "clearly aimed at national syndicators like Clear Channel that offer conservative shows," Anderson says. "It's a Fairness Doctrine by subterfuge." Obama would pair that with relicensing stations every two years instead of the current eight.

 

With both the executive and legislative branches firmly in the power of the most liberal leadership ever — Obama, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — it is naive to think they would not move against those who most threaten their prospects in the midterm elections of 2010. And that is Fox News and conservative talk radio, supported by the blogosphere.

 

The establishment media and liberal Democrats constitute an axis of bias, arming to threaten the free speech of Americans. George Orwell, call your office. Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com

 

The tape recording of an interview that Barack Obama gave to Radio Station WBEZ in Chicago in 2001 surfaced, and in that interview Mr. Obama, then a law professor and a state senator, lays out how he would redistribute the wealth. He sounds like a man with a plan.

 

The interview explains a lot, beginning with the attempt, abetted by a mainstream media that no longer tries to hide its slavish obeisance to the Democratic campaign, to destroy Joe the Plumber and shut down discussion of the implications of what the candidate said.

 

One of the "tragedies of the civil-rights movement," Mr. Obama says, is that the Supreme Court did not address redistribution of wealth, probably because of the inherent difficulty of achieving such goals through the courts. The Supreme Court did not break from the restraints of the Constitution and "we still suffer from that." Mr. Obama is not "optimistic" that the Supreme Court can achieve redistribution of wealth - of taking from the workers to give to the deadbeats - but he obviously thinks he knows how to do it. A president with a compliant Congress, which he expects to be in January, can do it through legislation and "administration."

 

The Barack Obama of this interview clearly does not think much of what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us: "The Constitution reflected the enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on to this day. The framers had that same blind spot ... the fundamental flaw of this country." Read article.

 

Dennis Prager, JWR.com

 

If change in policies from those of George W. Bush were all Barack Obama meant by change, "change" would not elicit anywhere near the passion it does. Nor would it be the basis of the depth of his appeal to his left-wing supporters.

 

What Barack Obama is tapping into with the word "change" is nearly eight years of the left's constructing a description of an America that has been made so awful that "change" means changing America, not just changing policies.

 

The truth is that aside from the Iraq war, which is turning out to be quite successful, George W. Bush's policies have not been particularly controversial or even particularly right-wing. But the left has constructed for itself a view of America that, if you subscribe to it, makes radical change imperative.

 

The left, from The New York Times to MoveOn.org, has led itself and others to believe that the following lies..... Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

Ohio Democrats refused to act on ACORN's massive vote fraud. Yet they have time to scour the private records of Joe the Plumber. No wonder Barack Obama finds the Constitution an inconvenience.

 

Joe Wurzelbacher (also known as Joe the Plumber) has learned there's a price to pay for being the one to get Obama to admit that he has a socialist dream to "spread the wealth." Not only are you thrust into the public eye, you get the privilege of having government officials who support Obama rifle through private files looking for dirt on you.

 

Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and a maxed-out contributor to the Obama campaign, has confirmed that she approved the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher after the Oct. 15 presidential debate.

 

Jones-Kelley explained her governmental prying by saying, "Our practice is when someone is thrust quickly into the public spotlight, we often take a look" at them. For example, she cited the case of a lottery winner who was found to owe back child support. But Wurzelbacher didn't win the lottery; he merely asked how much more of his hard-earned money was going to be taxed away under the Obama plan.

 

According to the Columbus-Dispatch, at least four state computer checks on Wurzelbacher were conducted shortly after Republican John McCain frequently brought up "Joe the Plumber" during the final presidential debate. In addition to the Department of Job and Family Services, driver's license and vehicle registration information on "Joe" was pulled from Bureau of Motor Vehicles computers. Read article.

 

Laura Ingraham, JWR.com

 

Peggy Noonan said Friday that if "Mr. McCain loses, the reason will not be press bias." That, of course, will be impossible to determine one way or the other. But we do know the media is trying its best to prove Peggy wrong. The media's malfeasance and malpractice may prove decisive:

 

Money. The airwaves are saturated with Obama advertising. These ads are financed by record campaign hauls, much of which comes from illegal fund-raising. (Obama's website allows contributors to use phony names, thereby allowing well-off financiers to circumvent contribution limits.) More than 80% of Obama's fund-raising has come from "small donors," whose names we don't know. Where are the calls for transparency? Who knows how many Obama commercials would be possible absent the illicit cash.

 

Reporting. Sen. McCain is quickly learning that the media is consistent only in mangling his words and his ideas, all the while giving a free pass to inaccurate criticisms against him. Like countless Republicans before him, McCain now knows that if he wants his message to reach the people, he needs to speak to them directly, bypassing the dinosaur media. Even worse, though, is that when an Average Joe (e.g., Joe the Plumber), asks a question the press won't, the media joins, and in some cases leads, the partisan witch-hunt to destroy him. Read article.

 

Neal Boortz , Townhall.com

 

The election is now days way. If you've made up your mind for Obama; or if you're trying to noodle through some of the things he's been saying on the campaign trail, this should help. And if you’re voting for Obama, clearly you need help.   I've taken four statements that The Chosen One repeats at almost every campaign rally. Now these statements are pretty powerful ... if unchallenged ... and we know that the MoveOn Media isn't exactly what we would call "eager" to challenge God's Candidate on any of these issues.

 

So, here we go again .. this simple talk show host (right wing, hate-filled shock jock, I believe they call us) is going to use some basic logic and the ability to actually read newspapers to catch you up to speed on just what the Big BO is saying here.

 

 

This Obama promise has already been pretty much debunked in the media. The problem is that it hasn't been debunked on the Black Entertainment Television network or on Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight. Until these television outlets bring forth the facts most of Obama's supporters won't know the truth. Read article.