Family Fugitive

This is the end. The very last post I'll ever do on Barack's White Lies. But it is also the beginning. Barack's White Lies is moving, and evolving. Think of it as Change You Can Believe In. The new blog will be called, after an adjustment period, Real Clear Thinker. All future posts can be found at realclearthinker.com. Starting now.

Just because the election is over, don't expect people like Bill Ayers to be forthcoming regarding friendship with Barack Obama.

Ayers was on Good Morning America today, trying to make it seem that the history between he and Barack consists of little more than the two being neighbors. Ayers states, remarkably, that the first time he "ever really met him" was the day in 1996 that he held a fundraiser in his home for Barack.

The college professor also argued to "Good Morning America's" Chris Cuomo today that the bombing campaign by the Weather Underground, the group he helped found, was not terrorism.

The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the New York City Police Department in protest of the Vietnam War.

"It's not terrorism because it doesn't target people, to kill or injure," Ayers said.

Keep in mind that the year before the fundraiser, Barack was made the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an organization founded by Ayers that year, and a position for which Obama was immensely unqualified. They worked on the same floor of the same medium sized office building together.

Keep in mind, also, that in the release of his 2001 memoir, "Fugitive Days," which Ayers is apparently out promoting, Ayers writes this:

"[W]e had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign."

Notice he calls he and Barack "family friends," a deliberate attempt, it would seem, to tease people anew about the closeness that he and Barack maintain. If you're not convinced that this is a little bizarre, Ayers explanation for it certainly is. He claims the reason he called Barack a family friend in his book is because that's how the relationship was portrayed during the campaign.

"I'm talking there about the fact that I became an issue, unwillingly and unwittingly," he said. "It was a profoundly dishonest narrative. ... I'm describing there how the blogosphere characterized the relationship."

"I would say, really, that we knew each other in a professional way on the same level of, say, thousands of other people," he said.

Ayers has a detached manner, free of remorse, that makes him read as a psychopath in the interview, arguing that he's been unfairly demonized in an attempt to taint Barack with guilt by association.

"The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our government. ... I never hurt or killed anyone," Ayers said.

"Frankly, I don't think we did enough, just as today I don't think we've done enough to stop these wars," he said.

It seems to me that voters had a right to know the truth about their relationship, that it's up to us to decide whether Barack's association with Ayers was a valid campaign issue, and that Ayers is plainly misrepresenting the relationship.

Further, Barack lied about his friendship with Jeremiah Wright before the Ayers matter became part of the conversation, and the evidence indicates that he's being equally dishonest regarding Ayers.

Michelle's Choice

It's great to have options regarding where to send your kids to school - something that Democrats believe deeply in, but only for the rich.

President-elect Obama and his wife, Michelle, came to town and did what people with young children usually do before moving. They looked at their new house and then Mrs. Obama checked out the school choices for their two young daughters.

The schools Mrs. Obama visited were private, not public. While no decision has yet been made, it seems obvious the girls enjoy their private school in Chicago and have flourished in it. Would the Obamas, in order to pander to the teachers unions, place their daughters in one of Washington, D.C.’s miserable public schools? Let’s hope not. That would be a form of intellectual and social child abuse.

True. No responsible parent would put their kids into public schools like these - and people with options generally avoid all public schools if they're not in segregated, privileged suburbs.

Should they choose either Sidwell Friends School (where Chelsea Clinton attended) or Georgetown Day School — Mrs. Obama visited both — or a public school, the Obamas have the ability to make a choice for their children, a choice the president-elect would deny to every other American who cannot afford to pay private school tuition. This is not the vaunted fairness for which Obama campaigned. This is not spreading the educational and intellectual wealth around.

How does Barack explain his behavior? Probably the same way other Democratic leaders, who throw a nice big slap into the face of those working people they preach public schools to.

This year, 1,900 D.C. schoolchildren were allowed to attend private schools, thanks to congressional vouchers. With Democrats about to be in charge of all three branches of government, will Obama and his fellow Democrats send them back to failed schools? D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has suggested as much. Parents interviewed by Washington TV stations overwhelmingly want their children to remain where they are. Is it not cruel to force them back into a broken system?

Many Members of Congress choose private schools for their children. Senators Edward Kennedy and Hillary Clinton have been outspoken opponents of school choice yet have sent their children to private schools. According to a 2007 Heritage Foundation survey, “...37 percent of representatives and 45 percent of senators in the 110th Congress sent their children to private schools — almost four times the rate of the general population.” Yet many of them vote against letting the rest of us have the same choice.

Our kids deserve better schools, but the partnership between teachers unions and the Democratic party make that impossible.

This will offer children trapped in bad schools the brighter future they deserve and the country will get the better educated citizenry it desperately needs.

Doctrine Air

Thoughts on the Fairness Doctrine from Adam Reilly in the Boston Phoenix.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asserted that the right to broadcast — on scarce, publicly owned frequencies — came with civic responsibility. Broadcasters, the FCC held, should devote some of their programming to controversial matters of public interest. They should also allow divergent points of view to be presented on their stations. That's the Fairness Doctrine in a nutshell. (In one famous case, the Supreme Court ruled that the author of a critical biography of Barry Goldwater had the right to respond to a torrent of criticism directed at him from a Christian broadcaster in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.)

The doctrine's intentions were commendable. But it was vague, and spottily applied, and co-existed uneasily with the First Amendment's right to free speech. And in 1987 — at the height of Reagan-era deregulation — it was voluntarily abolished by the FCC. The FCC's decision was upheld on appeal to the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989, and subsequent congressional efforts to restore it have failed.

Many observers believe that's for the best. "The Fairness Doctrine had this perverse result," says Jane Kirtley, director of the University of Minnesota's Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law. "The way some broadcasters chose to provide equal time for opposing viewpoints to be heard was to say that they just weren't going to cover controversial issues. I have no reason to think that would change in 2008 or 2009." Factor in the rise of cable news and the Web, adds Kirtley, and the Fairness Doctrine's original rationale doesn't make sense anymore.

Media critic Rory O'Connor, who discusses the subject in Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio (AlterNet), agrees. "The Fairness Doctrine is a 20th-century response to 21st-century problems," he says. "It didn't work so well in the first place. It was misused and abused by political operatives in both parties." There is, O'Connor claims, "no way in Hell" that the Fairness Doctrine's going to be reinstated. Conservatives are only milking the subject to "excite the base, create outrage, and drive up ratings."

No question, the right's treatment of the subject is irresponsible. A restored Fairness Doctrine wouldn't "kill" the conservative-friendly medium of talk radio, or mandate "equal time" for the presentation of liberal and conservative perspectives. Instead, it would simply require conservative broadcast outlets to allow the occasional liberal voice, and vice versa.

To be fair, though, conservative fears aren't entirely unfounded. While Obama seems to favor regulating broadcasters to achieve specific aims, including increased minority ownership, he's indicated he doesn't want to restore the Fairness Doctrine. But other prominent Democrats disagree. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi recently told the conservative magazine Human Events that she supports the Fairness Doctrine. On Election Day, Democratic New York senator Chuck Schumer told Fox News you couldn't oppose the Fairness Doctrine while supporting government regulation of obscenity, as many conservatives do. And other Dems — including Massachusetts senator John Kerry, the subject of an attack documentary broadcast on Sinclair Broadcasting's 62 (conservative) stations during his 2004 presidential run — have made similar remarks.

Time for restraint
That some Democrats might relish the idea of punishing Limbaugh and his compadres is understandable. But there are strong arguments for restraint. The first is constitutional: the Fairness Doctrine would exist, yet again, in tension with the First Amendment. The second is strategic: the inchoate sense of grievance that currently animates the right has slim political potential — but that could change if Republicans can style themselves as free-speech defenders.

The most important reason for caution, though, is the nascent effort to link the Fairness Doctrine with Net Neutrality. Without Net Neutrality, the telecom industry will almost certainly create a two-tiered system that privileges some content, while consigning the rest — created, presumably, by those who lack big bucks — to a sort of virtual ghetto.

Thus far, Net Neutrality hasn't been a partisan issue. Obama supports it; so does NARAL Pro-Choice America; so does the Christian Coalition and the National Rifle Association.

But efforts to fragment the broad, pro–Net Neutrality alliance are already underway — and the Fairness Doctrine seems destined for a starring role. In an October 2007 paper titled "Net Neutrality: A Fairness Doctrine for the Internet," Adam Thierer of the Progress & Freedom Foundation — a think tank funded by, among others, AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable — suggested that Net Neutrality was actually a partisan ploy aimed at crippling the right. Groups such as the Christian Coalition, Thierer suggested, should reconsider their support.

Then, this past August, Republican FCC commissioner Robert McDowell made a similar argument at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Regarding Net Neutrality, McDowell asked, "Will Web sites — will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views, rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?"

This is a stupid question. The Fairness Doctrine involved government mandating, in certain cases, that specific content be added to a particular media entity. In contrast, Net Neutrality doesn't involve intrusion into content; it only dictates absolute freedom of (virtual) movement. It's the opposite of what McDowell seems to think.

But as Joe Campbell, author of the blog 2parse.com, recently noted in a post linking Thierer's paper and McDowell's remarks, this is about tactics, not logic. If conservative Net Neutrality supporters come to see it as the Fairness Doctrine 2.0 — something that's more easily done if the Fairness Doctrine is already on everyone's brain, as it is today — they might rethink their support. Given Democratic gains in Congress and Obama's support for Net Neutrality, Campbell argues, "This is the big corporations' only chance to squash Net Neutrality."

Now that's a scary prospect. The Web is the future of news media. (It's also a battleground where, at the moment, Democrats are totally dominating Republicans.) Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine is a dubious proposition, period. But if doing so could jeopardize the success of Net Neutrality, it's downright reckless.

Instead of reliving an old-media battle that's run its course, Democrats should focus instead on making Net Neutrality a reality. And Obama should help them by stating that he'll veto any legislation aimed at restoring the Fairness Doctrine that crosses his desk. Let the right worry about something else.

To read the "Don't Quote Me" blog, go to thePhoenix.com/medialog. Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly@phx.com.

Pressing Sarah

At the Republican Governor's Conference in Miami, it might as well be reconfigured into the Sarah Palin Conference. After Barack, she's the biggest political star in the country.

At a short press conference, she was asked what she's doing since the last governor's get-together.

“I had a baby, I did some traveling, I very briefly expanded my wardrobe, I made a few speeches, I met a few VIPS, including those who really impact society, like Tina Fey,” she said.

And yes, she spoke again of “Joe the Plumber,” the Ohio man who briefly dominated the McCain-Palin campaign and its talk about taxes.

Ms. Palin thanked the people who attended her rallies, including young women she hopes she has influenced.

“I am going to remember all the young girls who came up to me at rallies to see the first woman having the privilege of carrying our party’s VP nomination,” she said. “We’re going to work harder, we’re going to be stronger, we’re going to do better and one day, one of them will be the president.”

That raised again the question surrounding Ms. Palin since the election ended: will she run in 2012?

“The future is not that 2012 Presidential race, it’s next year and our next budgets,” she said. It is in 2010, she said, that “we’ll have 36 governors positions open.”

Bad News

MSNBC got confirmation of the Sarah Palin Africa controversy from a McCain campaign insider who doesn't exist.

MSNBC was the victim of a hoax when it reported that an adviser to John McCain had identified himself as the source of an embarrassing story about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, the network said Wednesday.

David Shuster, an anchor for the cable news network, said on air Monday that Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, had come forth and identified himself as the source of a Fox News Channel story saying Palin had mistakenly believed Africa was a country instead of a continent.

How can such a thing happen to a major news organization?

Eisenstadt identifies himself on a blog as a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. Yet neither he nor the institute exist; each is part of a hoax dreamed up by a filmmaker named Eitan Gorlin and his partner, Dan Mirvish, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

The Eisenstadt claim had mistakenly been delivered to Shuster by a producer and was used in a political discussion Monday afternoon, MSNBC said.

"The story was not properly vetted and should not have made air," said Jeremy Gaines, network spokesman. "We recognized the error almost immediately and ran a correction on air within minutes."

Gaines told the Times that someone in the network's newsroom had presumed the information solid because it was passed along in an e-mail from a colleague.

The hoax doesn't mean that Sarah knows where Africa is...

The hoax was limited to the identity of the source in the story about Palin — not the Fox News story itself. While Palin has denied that she mistook Africa for a country, the veracity of that report was not put in question by the revelation that Eisenstadt is a phony.

It just proves that MSNBC doesn't know what journalism is.

Say Anything

Like most politicians, Barack was willing to say anything to win the presidency. Dig any hole now, we can climb out of it later.

A suicide car bomber struck a U.S. military convoy passing through a crowded market in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, killing at least five civilians and a coalition soldier and wounding an additional 57 civilians, officials said.

In order to be a peace candidate while not being perceived as weak on defense, Barack embraced the war in Afghanistan - that's the war we need to fight, that's the war we need to win, he said - Iraq was the wrong war.

The bomber rammed his vehicle into the convoy as it traveled through Bati Kot district of Nangarhar province, said Ahmad Zia Abdulzai, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

At least five civilians were killed in the blast, said Ghafoor Khan, the spokesman for the provincial police chief. Fifty-seven civilians were wounded, said Ajmal Pardes, a provincial health official.

Now, Barack has challenges other than looming economic disaster - how to responsibly (ie gradually) withdraw from Iraq after having built expectations that he'll draw down willy-nilly, and how to win the war in Afghanistan using troops who really need rest, not redeployment.

Lt. Cmdr. Walter Matthews, a U.S. military spokesman, said a member of the U.S-led coalition died of his injuries received in the attack. He would not disclose the nationality of the victim, but another U.S. spokesman earlier said that the wounded soldier was an American.

If confirmed, that death would bring the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan this year to at least 148, the highest annual tally of troop deaths since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. There were 111 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan in all of 2007.

Barack took ownership of Afghanistan in order to change the long held perception that Democrats can't be trusted to defend the nation. It's his war now, and he's got to win it.

The bomber struck the convoy near a crowded market, where people were trading sheep, cows, goats and other animals, Mr. Khan said. An Associated Press photographer said that an American military vehicle, two civilian vehicles and two rickshaws were destroyed.

Taliban militants regularly use suicide attackers and car bombs in their assaults against U.S., Afghan and other foreign troops in the country. But a majority of the victims in such attacks have been civilians. On Wednesday, a truck bomb in southern Afghanistan killed six people and wounded 42.

Lobbyist Schnobbyist

Barack's campaign stand against lobbyists was meaningless as policy - a deceptive stance of no practical meaning. Now, for the sake of real life, he's watered it down to make it even less meaningful, and more symbolic.

President-elect Obama, who campaigned against lobbyists' influence, on Tuesday opened the door for them to work for him if they sign an ethics code that restricts their role in and out of government.

Lobbyists can work for Obama's transition if they stop their advocacy efforts and avoid working in any field that they lobbied on in the last year. They also must pledge not to lobby the Obama administration on the same matters they focused on during the transition for a year after leaving Obama's service.

As bad as things are in Washington, all this symbolism and watering down of the campaign commitment actually represents a noticeable improvement.

The ethics policy allows Obama to hire any of the some 22,000 federally registered lobbyists who could be valuable assets because of their government experience, even though Obama railed against their influence on the campaign trail.

Of course, it's yet another abandonment of a strong policy stance. He was just kidding about his lobbying stand.

Podesta called the lobbying ban "the strictest, the most far-reaching ethic rules of any transition team in history." Yet the transition rules are not as strict as those that Obama has proposed for his administration's staff.

In a speech last November in Spartanburg, S.C., Obama said: "I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race ... I don't take a dime of their money, and when I am president, they won't find a job in my White House."

They won't find a job in my White House. Now there's a White Lie.

At other times, he said lobbyists would not "run" his White House.

Under recommendations spelled out in Obama's campaign Web site, no Obama political appointees would be allowed to work on regulations or contracts "directly or substantially related to their prior employer for two years." And while people who work on the transition would be permitted to lobby the administration on their transition issues after one year, political appointees to administration jobs would be prohibited from lobbying the executive branch for the remainder of the administration, according to Obama's proposed rules.

Podesta said the specifics of the administration rules are still being worked out, but it would include the two-year ban that Obama pledged. He said it was shortened to one year for the transition because it's a short-term assignment before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Government watchdogs applauded the ethics rules in an unusual statement issued through the campaign. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution called the rules "tough and unequivocal" and said they come with a cost of keeping some honorable people from serving the transition, while Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute called them "far-reaching, bold and constructive" to restore trust in government.

Bake Sale

The Money Machine never rests.

The election is hardly finished, and the fundraising has begun anew.The Obama campaign, which raised more than $600 million for the election of the junior senator from Illinois as the next president of the United States, is selling celebratory T-shirts.

Thirty bucks.

Obama T-shirts.jpg

The proceeds are going to the Democratic National Committee, which appearently has put itself in some debt with the massive organization it helped finance for the Obama campaign. President-elect Barack Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, have their work cut out for them, a campaign e-mail explains, "But before we take the next step, we need to get our house in order.

The King Demands Your Presents

Hey, cut her a little slack, wouldja? It's not like she came to the door wearing only a towel or nothin'! Jeez!

The co-chair of Barack Obama's Transition Team, Valerie Jarrett, appeared on Meet the Press this weekend and used, shall we say, an interesting word to described what she thinks Barack Obama will be doing in January when he's officially sworn into office. She told Tom Brokaw that Obama will be ready to "rule" on day one.

Ya, well so what? He is ready to rule the world.

It's a word that reflects the worst fears that people have for Obama the "arrogant," the "messiah," that imagines he's here to "rule" instead of govern.

Jarret told Brokaw that "given the daunting challenges that we face, it's important that president elect Obama is prepared to really take power and begin to rule day one."

Hey, it's not like she thinks Africa is a country or somethin' stupid! She just said he's ready to take the throne!

Not So Funny

New Obama's are already being born.

Barack Obama may have a "funny name," as he once said - but it might just catch on among the nation's newborns.

A Florida couple became among the country's first to bestow it on their child, even before most news outlets had declared the Illinois senator the president-elect.

Sanjae Obama Fisher was born at 8 p.m. local time at Hollywood's Memorial Regional Hospital to Patrick and Sasha Hall Fisher.

A hospital spokeswoman says it was the father's idea. But mom still got to watch the election, after 14 hours at the hospital.

Sanjae has two siblings, 8-year-old sister Shaniah and 4-year-old brother Shane.

In Arkansas, Benjamin Barack Kimbrough was born at 2:35 p.m. local time on Election Day to Walter and Adria Kimbrough. Walter Kimbrough is president of Philander Smith College, a historically black school in Little Rock.

In Maryland, a mother who went into labor Tuesday after voting for Obama named her newborn daughter for the Obamas' two girls, 7-year-old Sasha and Malia, 10.

Lakisha Brown of Joppa gave birth to Sasha Malia Ann Taylor at 12:36 a.m. local time Wednesday at Greater Baltimore Medical Center.

GBMC spokesman Michael Schwartzberg said Brown watched Obama's victory speech while she was in labor at the hospital. She says she was so struck by the love Obama showed to his daughters that she decided to name her baby after them.

It appears that Hussein has been ignored as an option thusfar.

Gut-Check

One of the blessings accompanying the shame of Barack's victory is the timing. This is not a moment for pushing measures that are bad economic policy, so the Obama administration will have to kick obviously destructive political payoff policy proposals down the road.

Obama is a cosponsor of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, which is also called the “card check” bill. The measure would allow workers to join a union when a majority of them sign authorization cards. Industry groups are strongly opposed to the bill, which is a top priority for unions. Republicans and business groups say the bill would compromise a worker’s right to cast a private ballot on whether to join a union.

Is card-check a good idea? Former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern says:

The legislation is called the Employee Free Choice Act, and I am sad to say it runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, EFCA risks silencing those who would speak. As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor.

Nancy Pelosi has tried to temper expectations of "change" as the change candidate claims victory - cognisant of the fact that even in good times, much of what liberals want is just not doable.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday called on President-elect Barack Obama to govern from the middle, as her party sat poised to gain its widest House majority in 15 years.

And the auto manufacturers, suffering from the bad deals they were intimidated into making with unions through the years, are looking for a government payout. Is this a time to give more power to the unions when we're paying for their destructive impact?

Is this a time to bail out the unions, who have done so much damage? Hopefully, Barack will realize we can't afford it.

Obama Glow

President Bush puts McCain out to pasture...

... and seeks to bask in the Obama-glow.

No Mandate

Robert Novak - No Mandate:

The national election Tuesday was not only historic for the election of the first African-American president in the nation's history but also for how little the avalanche of Democratic votes changed the political alignment in Congress.

The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt won his second term for president in 1936, the defeated Republican candidate, Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas, won only two states, Maine and Vermont, and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress by wide margins.

But Obama's win was nothing like that. He may have opened the door to enactment of the long-deferred liberal agenda, but he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.

The Democrats fell several votes short of the 60-vote filibuster-proof Senate that they were seeking and also failed to get rid of a key Senate target: Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Republicans, though discouraged by the election's outcome, believe Obama will be hard-pressed not so much to enact his agenda but to keep his popular majority, which he considers centrist, as he moves to enact ultra-liberal legislation, particularly the demands of organized labor.

Chump Change

Nearly half of American wage earners pay no federal income taxes. Barack proposes that in order to make that system more fair, those who aren't paying any taxes should get a rebate paid to them from the taxes from the 5% who pay 50% of the nation's income tax burden. Do people really believe this?


Barack's explanation for this unfairness to the top 5%?

"Right now, they are getting taxed at 36 percent. Under Bill Clinton in the 1990s, they were being taxed at 39.6 percent. You're talking about a 3.6 percent difference, and, you know, for, you know, the average person who is making half a million, a million dollars -- people like you Sway -- that's chump change, that's nothing. But it could make a big difference for that young person who is trying to figure out whether they can go to college or not, if we could give them more of a break or give them more scholarships or grants to go to college."

Chump Change?

The Tax Policy Center says a person or family making $500,000 a year would pay $3,363 in additional income tax under the Obama plan.

A person or family making $1,000,000 a year would see their tax burden increase by $28,301 under the Obama plan.

Cool on Coal

We told you earlier about Barack's plan, laid out in his own words, to squeeze the coal industry into bankruptcy in order to save the planet. Sarah Palin went after him for that today.

“He said that, sure, if the industry wants to build coal-fired power plants, then they can go ahead and try, he says, but they can do it only in a way that will bankrupt the coal industry, and he's comfortable letting that happen,” Palin said. “And you got to listen to the tape.”

Barack made the comment last January in a conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Why is the audiotape just now surfacing?” Palin asked, leading someone in the crowd to shout, “Liberal media!”

“This interview was given to San Francisco folks many, many months ago,” Palin said. “You should have known about this, so that you would have better decision-making information as you go into the voting booth.”

This has to do with saving the planet, you know.

In the audiotape, Obama reiterated his call for a cap and trade system on carbon and greenhouse gases.

“So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” Obama said. “It's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.”

The Obama camp disputes Palin's assertion.

“The point Obama is making is that we need to transition from coal burning power plants built with old technology to plants built with advanced technologies--and that is exactly the action that will be incentivized under a cap and trade program,” the spokesperson said. “We know that additional work is necessary to develop and deploy these technologies. That is why Obama has argued for a robust funding program for carbon capture and sequestration. It’s strikingly similar to what McCain has said (in fact McCain goes a step further saying he wants to transition completely away from coal).”

Pro Business

Let them eat coal, says Barack.

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I've said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else's out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted.

Sounds like a pro-business kinda guy.

Hawaiian Twang

Everyone is excited about this bit of video tape from Barack, doing an interview in 1995, in which he praises is Reverend Wright. What I find far more intriguing is Barack's accent - or lack thereof. Where'd the twang come from? Was it acquired as an electoral strategy?

How Would I Know?

How would he know?

Sen. Barack Obama didn't know his aunt might be living illegally in the United States, as media outlets are reporting, his campaign said Saturday.

How would he know? He didn't know that Reverend Wright was a racist, and he spent 18 years going to his church.

He didn't know Bill Ayers was an unrepentant terrorist, even though Ayers was his mentor. So how would he know that his favorite Aunt was living illegally in Boston on the public dole?

The Plot Thickens

This week we learned more about the compassionate side of Barack. You'll remember that several weeks ago it was learned that Barack's brother George was living in a box.

George Onyango Obama, the half-brother of Senator Barack Obama, lives in a hut outside Nairobi and survives on a mere $12 a year and says he is "ashamed" when people find out he is Obama's half-brother.

This week we learned that Barack's aunt was living in Boston - and doing much better than George - on the public dime.

In his Wednesday night infomercial, Obama declared that his "fundamental belief" was that "I am my brother's keeper."

Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother's keeper, why couldn't he send him a $10 bill and nearly double the guy's income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother's keeper, and his aunt's keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

Now, we get an added bonus - Barack's aunt is an illegal alien.

Barack Obama's aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago, The Associated Press has learned.

How sweet it is!

Zeituni Onyango, 56, referred to as "Aunti Zeituni" in Obama's memoir, was instructed to leave the United States by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango's case.

That Barack is a wacko liberal now becomes indisputable! The common liberal might occasionally practice some of the things he preaches - he might recycle or have a compost pile - but the most radical of the breed are busy writing major outbursts against global warming while jetting to their favorite vacation spot for the weekend.

Onyango is Obama's paternal aunt, one of several children of the senator's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama. In his memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama refers to Onyango affectionately as “Aunt Zeituni” and recalls that she was the first person to greet him when he stepped off a plane and arrived for the first time in Kenya.

"'Welcome home,' Zeituni said, kissing me on both cheeks," Obama wrote.

Just because democrats believe in being compassionate doesn't mean we should expect them to act the belief out. They also believe in good education, and better opportunity for minorities, yet they hold millions of minorities in permanent poverty by forcing them into shamlessly bad urban schools. These words they throw around, they're just words - a weapon used to diminish the competition.

Onyango's case — coming to light just days before the presidential election — led to an unusual nationwide directive within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requiring any deportations prior to Tuesday's election to be approved at least at the level of ICE regional directors, the U.S. law enforcement official told the AP.

The unusual directive suggests that the Bush administration is sensitive to the political implications of Onyango's case coming to light so close to the election.

I wonder what Barack would do with his aunt as president.

Obama and Biden support a system that requires undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.

Ah, but she's not in good standing. Would he be compassionate and bring her "out of the shadows?" Or would he deport her? Here's a shoker - his website position paper doesn't go into that much detail.

$3 Million

A group of ethical Democrats campaigns against Barack.