Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Sarah Palin at GOP Rally

Here's video footage of two of my favorite women in American politics right now, Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Sarah Palin:

At one point, Hasselbeck says of the media, "instead of the issues, they are focused on her wardrobe," a reference to the media's hypocrisy surrounding the RNC $150,000 outlay for Palin's new campaing clothing.

Don't miss Palin's speech as well, where she defends her wardrobe, here (via Memeorandum).

Recall too that while the RNC spent $150,000 for a wardrobe that Sarah Palin would return (and perhaps give to charity), the DNC spent $5.3 million just for the stage, lighting, and construction costs for the Acropolis-themed podium and stage-backdrop at Mile High Stadium for Obama's August 28 nomination acceptance speech.

No media bias this election, right?

See also, "Palin and Hasselbeck Blast 'Ridiculous' Wardrobe Story" (via Memeorandum).

Obama Declares War on Conservative Values

Debbie at Right Truth's got a great essay up, "Barack Obama Declares War":

Senator Barack Obama has declared war - on everything important to Conservative Americans.

Don't believe me???

There's example after example at the post, but this part is crucial:

AMERICAN CULTURE: Barack Obama has basically declared war on American culture, in favor of multiculturalism as put forth by the United Nations. "An informal survey of more than two dozen U.N. staff members and foreign delegates showed that the overwhelming majority would prefer that Sen. Barack Obama win the presidency, saying they think that the Democrat would usher in a new agenda of multilateralism after an era marked by Republican disdain for the world body."

Conservatives who are skeptical of the United Nations said they are not surprised by the political tilt. “The fact is that most conservatives, most Republicans don’t worship at the altar in New York, and I think that aggravates them more than anything else,” said John R. Bolton, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “What they want is the bending of the knee, and they’ll get it from an Obama administration.” (continue reading at Washington Post, hat tip Malignant Liberal Idiocy).

That sounds about right, and we can see it in this article, "At the U.N., Many Hope for an Obama Win."

The First Metropolitan Machine Candidate

Recall my earlier post, "Loving America Means Having Small-Town Values."

Well, apparently the Democratic campaign is sensitive to charges that Barack Obama's an "urban" candidate, so they've come up with a new line: Obama's the first metropolitan candidate in American history (via Memeorandum):

Republicans, looking to frame Sen. Barack Obama as a candidate outside the mainstream, recently settled on a new tack: deriding him as an out of touch and corrupt urbanite.

At the GOP convention last month, Rudy Giuliani -- the former mayor of quite a large city -- chided the Democratic nominee for minimizing Sarah Palin's experience as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska: "I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her home town isn't cosmopolitan enough." The rest of Sen. John McCain's campaign hammered Obama as a product of the "Chicago political machine." And two weeks ago, Palin hailed "pro-America" small towns at a stop in North Carolina.

Many Obama partisans detected a vague racial appeal in the anti-urban framing. But the attacks also highlighted an overlooked aspect of the Illinois senator's rise: that in a country forever in thrall to its frontier and small-town heritage, he is the rare White House contender who really is a creature of the big city.

This raises two questions: Is Obama's ascent a further sign -- on top of volatile gas prices, plummeting home values in the exurbs and recent population upticks even in Baltimore and Newark -- that our cities are back and that the country is making peace with its non-agrarian side? And would a big-city president address as never before the problems of our urban cores -- blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools?

Obama partisans answer both questions in the affirmative -- with a key qualifier. The Democratic nominee, they say, should be viewed less as the first urban candidate in a long time than as the first metropolitan candidate -- a semantic distinction suggesting that the urban resurgence has a ways to go.

The article continues by discussing how American history shows increased urbanization, and says we haven't had a truly big-city candidate since Democrat Al Smith in 1928.

But even the Washington Post can't deny Obama's roots in Chicago's one-party machine poltics:

Obama grew up in Honolulu and Jakarta and has spent his entire adult life in big cities -- college in Los Angeles and New York, law school in Boston (okay, Cambridge) and 20 years in Chicago, the iconic American city, on which Obama settled as his home and launching pad. As a community organizer, he helped public housing residents take on City Hall; he married a native Chicagoan; and his campaign is based in a Michigan Avenue tower.

His style is as urbane as American politics get -- blazers with no tie, the slow stride across the stage. His political base is even more urban than is typical for a Democrat, while he struggles with rural voters despite playing up his mother's Kansas roots. One of the first interest groups he met with after securing the Democratic nomination in June was an alliance of bicycling advocates. Yet Obama has hardly adopted the sort of agenda we've come to expect from urban candidates -- much to the consternation of some of his supporters. With his organizer background, he could have cast himself as a knight riding to the rescue of cities neglected by Republican administrations. Instead, he has adopted the framing increasingly favored by many mayors and urban-policy types -- promoting America's cities based on their strengths, not their failings.

The fact is, Barack Obama is a classic big-city pol, and he'll take his radical community organizing model right into the White House, providing entrée to a long line of scurrilous associates and unrepentant domestic terrorists.

I laid out an analysis along these lines in "Barack Obama and Chicago Machine Politics," where I link to the awesome essay from the Chicago Tribune's John Kass, "A Presidential Debate, the Chicago Way."

Kass indicates that Obama's roots on big-city machine politics is not something he wants to talk about, and this is why Democratic activists are redefining what it means to be urban versus rural in America today.

If there aren't really any heartland voters anymore, then Obama's not radically out of the mainstream of American political-culture after all. This is the biggest postmodernist scam of recent months in a Democratic election campaign of Orwellian proportions.

Barack Obama is an old-fashioned, big-city, tax-and-spent, race-conscious, left-wing machine politician.

The Democratic Party establishment and the pro-Obama mass-media will do anything they can to get folks to believe otherwise.

Obama Funding Scam Gets MSM Scrutiny, Finally

I noted last night, in "Obama's Criminal Fundraising Machine," the paucity of mainstream press coverage of Barack Obama's campaign finance irregularities.

There is a big page-one Washinton Post story out today, so maybe we'll see a little more attention to this in the days ahead:

Sen. Barack Obama's record-breaking $150 million fundraising performance in September has for the first time prompted questions about whether presidential candidates should be permitted to collect huge sums of money through faceless credit card transactions over the Internet.

Lawyers for both the Republican and Democratic parties have asked the Federal Election Commission to examine the issue, pointing to dozens of examples of what they say are lax screening procedures by the presidential campaigns that permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to make contributions.

"There is so much money coming in and yet very little ability to say with certainty that you know who is giving it," said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee's chief counsel.

While the potentially fraudulent or excessive contributions represent about 1 percent of Obama's staggering haul, the security challenge is one of several major campaign-finance-related questions raised by the Democrat's fundraising juggernaut.

Concerns about anonymous donations seeping into the campaign began to surface last month, mainly on conservative blogs. Some bloggers described their own attempts to display the flaws in Obama's fundraising program, donating under such obviously phony names as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and reported that the credit card transactions were permitted.

Obama officials said it should be obvious that it is as much in their campaign's interest as it is in the public's interest for fake contributions to be turned back, and said they have taken pains to establish a barrier to prevent them. Over the course of the campaign, they said, a number of additional safeguards have been added to bulk up the security of their system.

In a paper outlining those safeguards, provided to The Washington Post, the campaign said it runs twice-daily sweeps of new donations, looking for irregularities. Flagged contributions are manually reviewed by a team of lawyers, then cleared or refunded. Reports of misused credit cards lead to immediate refunds.

In September, according to the campaign, $1.8 million in online contributions was flagged, and $353,000 was refunded. Of the contributions flagged because a foreign address or bank account was involved, 94.1 percent were found to be proper. One-tenth of one percent were marked for refund, and 5.77 percent are still being vetted.

But clearly invented names have been used often enough to provoke an outcry from Republican critics. Donors to the Obama campaign using false names such as Doodad Pro and Good Will gave $17,375 through 1,000 separate donations, with no sign that they immediately tripped alarms at the campaign. Of more concern, Cairncross said, are reports that the campaign permitted money from 123 foreign nationals to enter its accounts.

The article minimizes the significance of the improper donations, as just "1 percent" of Obama's haul. The problem is that no one knows for sure how much of the Obama war chest was generated by Democratic money bundlers, wealthy individuals using infinite aliases, or corrupt foreign funnelling Third World money into an American presidential election.

As Captain Ed notes:

[Stanley] Mosk never thinks to ask the one question that has already occurred to conservative bloggers. What makes the Obama campaign different from online retail operations? After all, we have spent almost 15 years buying and selling products and services on the Internet, and retailers know how to protect themselves and their customers. They employ a system that compares the billing information on the order to the information in the credit-card system — and when they don’t match, the sale gets denied. Credit-card companies have gone an extra step in recent years by adding a security code to protect against fraudulent use.

The McCain campaign apparently uses these systems to prevent fraud. Why doesn’t Team Obama? That’s the pertinent question. Systems have existed for years to prevent exactly the kind of fraud that has occurred in Obama’s fundraising. Why did Team Obama deliberately avoid using them?

Why?

The Obama team's running an underground finance operation, as I reported in my Pajamas Media piece, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

The Obama campaign finance scandal is one of the stories that wouldn't have seen the light of day without the conservative blogsphere breaking it wide open.

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UPDATE: See also, Bradley Smith, "Obama's Huge Haul Should End This Fight," who notes:

Obama's epic fundraising should put to rest all the shibboleths about campaign finance reform - that it is needed to prevent corruption, that it equalizes the playing field, or that tax subsidies are needed to prevent corruption.

I touched on this in my piece, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

Obama's Media: The Return of the Partisan Press

Partisans of both sides routinely rail away at mass media bias, particularly when a critical news cycle focuses unwanted attention on a favored candidate.

But election 2008 will go down in history as the turning point in American's return to a partisan press.

It turns out that studies of press coverage of the election find that Democratic nominee Barack Obama enjoys a more than 2-to-1 advantage in favorable election coverage in the news (via Saberpoint):

The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.

Press treatment of Obama has been somewhat more positive than negative, but not markedly so.

But coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable - and has become more so over time. In the six weeks following the conventions through the final debate, unfavorable stories about McCain outweighed favorable ones by a factor of more than three-to-one -- the most unfavorable of all four candidates - according to the study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six-in-ten stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two-in-ten (14%) were positive.

This survey lays out the analysis fairly neutrally, with its stress on the balance of positive versus negative reporting - yet, that seems like a distinction without a difference (note only 14 percent of coverage in the last period was positive for McCain).

Michael Malone comes out directly to announce the end of an era of objective news reporting in the United States.

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

Note, too, this vignette from a reader at Instapundit (via PoliGazette):

Off the record, every suspicion you have about MSM being in the tank for O is true. We have a team of 4 people going thru dumpsters in Alaska and 4 in arizona. Not a single one looking into Acorn, Ayers or Freddiemae. Editor refuses to publish anything that would jeopardize election for O, and betting you dollars to donuts same is true at NYT, others. people cheer when CNN or NBC run another Palin-mocking but raising any reasonable inquiry into obama is derided or flat out ignored. The fix is in, and its working.

America today has a partisan press favoring the Democratic Party. In its conclusion a review of press bias in recent American history, the Colorado Springs Gazette notes:

The pretense of objectivity, long a part of our country's Fourth Estate, has been sacrificed at the altar of Obama. A majority of mainstream journalists have given up on the illusion of objectivity. They want the Democrats to win, they don't have the time or energy for fairness, and they'll give their professional lives for the cause if necessary. And that's OK. The genie has emerged from the bottle and she's never going back. At least Americans see her and know her better than ever.

Lefty commentators reponsing to this will tote-up numerous examples of how the press has been "unfair" to Obama, but one or two anomolous examples of critical reporting can't shake loose the fact that the mass media has abandoned its role as a non-partisan watchdog for the public good.

This is a shame not just for citizens hungering for balanced news on the state of the nation, but for the survival of Democratic legitimacy as well.

The Shape of the Race, 10-26-08

Dan Riehl's not throwing in the towel on a McCain victory, and he discounts elite media opinion on an Obama blowout:

This race is still close....

Don't tell me what some inside the beltway, alleged all-stars want to do. And the last thing anyone wants to do is get caught up in polling in an election with so many variables and unique challenges. It's hard to find a reasonable number of polling firms who agree precisely from one day to the next on a single result.

There is only one opinion that matters - the opinions realized as the votes of the American people scattered across the breadth and width of America's great Heartland. When those are cast and counted, I'll contemplate the future of this great nation. But until November 4th, frankly, none of us can really say.

Like me, Dan's ready to go down with the ship, and there have been a couple of recent polls showing a tightening in the election, for example, the recent IBD/TIPP survey:

Contrary to other polls, some of which show Obama ahead by double digits, the IBD/TIPP Poll shows a sudden tightening of Obama's lead to 3.7 from 6.0. McCain has picked up 3 points in the West and with independents, married women and those with some college. He's also gaining momentum in the suburbs, where he's gone from dead even a week ago to a 20-point lead. Obama padded gains in urban areas and with lower-class households, but he slipped 4 points with parents.

IBD/TIPP has a history of accuracy, although this poll finds youth voters going 53-43 for McCain over Obama, and that just doesn't sound right (and could be a signal of larger problems with the sample).

Yet, an Associated Press-GfK poll this week also found McCain and Obama essentially deadlocked heading into the final two weeks of the election.

The poll, which found Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 43 percent, supports what some Republicans and Democrats privately have said in recent days: that the race narrowed after the third debate as GOP-leaning voters drifted home to their party and McCain's "Joe the plumber" analogy struck a chord.

Both of these polls may very well be outliers from the main trend in dozens of surveys this last couple of weeks which have found Barack Obama ahead by high single-digits, and in some cases by double-digit margins.

That said, recall that it's a 50-state election, and we have to look at the shape of the race across the battlegrounds. Here's Andrew Romano with a nice run-down:

The important number to watch ... is how many electoral votes (EVs) Obama is collecting in states where he averages more than 50 percent support - i.e., states he'd win even if every single undecided voter breaks for McCain. As of today, the Illinois senator is topping 50 in all of the Kerry states (252 EV) plus Iowa (7), New Mexico (5), Colorado (9) and Virginia (13) - for a grand total of 286 EVs, or 16 more than he needs to win. What's more, there are signs that Ohio might be breaking his way as well. The three polls that were in the field this week--Big10 Battleground, CNN/Time and Quinnipiac--show Obama leading McCain 53-41, 50-46 and 52-38, respectively. Note that all of Obama's numbers start with a "5."

As with national polls, states averages lag behind events. So there's a chance that McCain could still catch up - or be catching up right now. That said, there's simply no evidence so far that "the presidential race has tightened." In fact, much the opposite. Like the rest of you political junkies, I'll be staying tuned to see whether something changes. But I won't let any single poll - however "close" - "shock" me into believing a storyline that's not supported by the stats.

Romano relies heavily on the left-leaning Nate Silver for his analyis, although it's hard to quibble with the numbers in the toss-up states, where McCain's clearly been struggling in states that went to the GOP in 2004 and 2000.

That said, a good number of insightful conservatives are simply looking ahead to the future of the Republican Party - how it will rebuild, who will be frontrunners in 2012, and how long will the party be in the wilderness?

See also my earlier essays, "The Shape of the Race, 10-16-08," and "The Shape of the Race, 10-1-08."

Obama's Criminal Fundraising Machine

I published an in-depth background analysis on this year's collapse of the post-1974 campaign finance regime at Pajamas Media yesterday, "Obama’s Fundraising Fraud."

It turns out that not only has Barack Obama violated his pledge to fund his campaign with public money, new revelations also indicate he's now running one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in American history:

As Scott Mirengoff at Powerline reported on Thursday, the Obama campaign refuses to screen credit card contributions for potential fraudulent transactions, and thus any individual could make unlimited contributions using infinite aliases.

It turns out, for example, that credit card companies deploy a variety of security measures to guarantee the processing of electronic transactions. For campaign giving, the key safeguards are vendor address verification, country of residence, and proof of citizenship. We now know that Obama operatives at the campaign’s website have disabled the security settings on vendor identity to expedite online donations, gifts that then speed through to fund election activities that would be flagged as illegal under normal FEC reporting standards.

Allapundit at Hot Air has shown that, as the news of Obama’s open-access credit card procedures went viral across the conservative blogosphere, readers conducted dozens of “experiments” to see if the Obama campaign would accept their money. In no time, the Obama campaign was accepting money from the likes of “JarackBoe BOamabiden” and “Nodda Realperson.” It’s unlikely that these donations will be flagged as fraudulent once the original credit card transactions clear. Thus, while amassing its illegal campaign-contributions war chest, the Obama campaign brazenly flouts the federal election regulations enacted during an earlier reform era of “hope and change.” Meanwhile, the pro-Obama liberal press looks the other way, partnering with the very corruption and duplicity the media industry has attacked during eight years of Republican power in Washington.

Make no mistake, the Democratic nominee may now be running the biggest underground finance operation since President Nixon deployed the “plumbers” as his key operatives for CREEP in 1972.

After a week of reporting across the conservative blogosphere, the mainstream press still refuses to investigate the story.

As Hindrocket notes:

Maybe after the campaign is safely over someone will be interested enough to find out how much of Obama's record campaign fundraising was criminal. Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty? On some other planet, with different reporters and editors, one might expect this to be a significant news story. Of course, in the world we live in, our reporters are too busy covering Sarah Palin's shoes and hair stylist to have time to notice that Barack Obama's entire campaign may be based on a foundation of criminal fraud.

See also, "Obama Campaign Runs Afoul of Finance Rules."

Outrage! Journalist Has Temerity to Ask Biden Real Questions

Joseph Biden, in an interview this week with Barbara West, of WFTV-Channel 9 in Orlando, Florida, became visibly angered by West's line of questioning, after she asked if Barack Obama would "spead the wealth":

WEST: You may recognize this famous quote, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

BIDEN: Are you joking? Is this a joke? ... Or is that a real question?

The Obama camp immediately cancelled a a follow-up interview with Jill Biden.

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ADDED: Ann Althouse takes issue with the Obama campaign:

Ha ha. Wow. You don't usually get questions like that. Biden can't believe it. But, you know, Biden handles it perfectly well. I don't see him losing his cool. He's fine. Good questions. Good answers. Ah, but what is lame is cutting off all future interviews with the station. Pussies!

**********

West responded to criticism of her interview:

We are given four minutes of a satellite window for these interviews. Four precious minutes. I got right down to it and, yes, I think I asked him some pointed questions. These are questions that are rolling about right now and questions that need to be asked. I don't think I was rude or inconsiderate to him. I think I was probing and maybe tough.

Daily Kos has posted West's e-mail for readers, "In case you want to drop Barbara a line..."

Yeah, just like folks wanted to drop Joe the Plumber a line, and there's the pattern: Ask Obama and his team an honest question, and you'll be hounded like a carrier of the plague.

What is this country coming to?

Obama's Assault on the Second Amendment

Via Cap'n Bob:

There is so much at stake in the coming weeks for these constitutionally-guaranteed rights. Keep this in mind as you look at this nice portrait of my favorite pistol - and be sure to vote with this in mind.

See also, "NRA Plans a Wider Ad Assault on Barack Obama in Battleground States;" "Obama and the Attempt to Destroy the Second Amendment;" and "Obama's Second Amendment & 'Clinging to Your Guns'."

Obama to Rekindle LBJ's Foreign Policy!

Melanie Phillips, with her usual aplomb, concisely lays out the danger of a Barack Obama administration in foreign affairs:

Obama thinks world conflicts are basically the west’s fault, and so it must right the injustices it has inflicted. That’s why he believes in ‘soft power’ — diplomacy, aid, rectifying ‘grievances’ (thus legitimising them, encouraging terror and promoting injustice) and resolving conflict by talking. As a result, he will take an axe to America’s defences at the very time when they need to be built up. He has said he will ‘cut investments in unproven missile defense systems’; he will ‘not weaponize space’; he will ‘slow our development of future combat systems’; and he will also ‘not develop nuclear weapons,’ pledging to seek ‘deep cuts’ in America’s arsenal, thus unilaterally disabling its nuclear deterrent as Russia and China engage in massive military buildups....

Obama dismisses the threat from Islamism, shows zero grasp of the strategic threat to the region and the world from the encirclement of Israel by Iran, displays a similar failure to grasp the strategic importance of Iraq, thinks Israel is instead the source of Arab and Muslim aggression against the west, believes that a Palestinian state would promote world peace and considers that Israel – particularly through the ‘settlements’ – is the principal obstacle to that happy outcome. Accordingly, Obama has said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders – actually the strategically indefensible 1948 cease-fire line, known accordingly as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

There's more at the link, and when you're finished there, check out Daniel Larison, who sees the reincarnation of LBJ's liberal containment in an Obama presidency:

The people worried about the second coming of Carter ought instead of be more concerned about an administration more like LBJ’s, in which we would all probably agree that an excess of hawkishness rather than the lack of it was the central flaw.

Larison blogs at the American Conservative, the home of unpatriotic conservatives "at war with America":

They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

I genuinely doubt Obama will send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops into foreign hostilities to fight our new "Cold War" against radical Islam!

But you've got to love those paleocons - they do know how to spice up an otherwise slow blogging night!

Who Are We to Question God's Plan?

Today's Wall Street Journal features the story of Parker Carden and his family of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Parker was diagnosed prenatally with a rare genetic abnormality of the kidneys that can kill an infant in the first year ("autosomal recessive polycystic kidney disease").

The Parker family was faced with the question on whether to terminate their pregnancy, a decision so traumatic that it nearly cost them their marriage. Advanced prenatal genetic testing, which provided the Parker family with the early diagnosis for their son, "allows parents to take on the role of gene police," according to researcher Evelyne Schuster, who's quoted in the Wall Street Journal article.

In other words, prenatal tests allow families to obtain an abortion and avoid the prospect of bringing into the world a seriously, even catastrophically, ill child.

The Parkers refused to do this, and Jennifer Carden explains her family's decision at her blog, "Our Family Whirlwind":

Things get better everyday and we are blessed that Parker is in our lives. He has taught us more compassion and love than we have ever known. He makes great strides everyday and no one...NO ONE... can put a cap on his potential. Not doctors, idiots commenting on-line about the article, or anybody else. Who are we to question God's plan for us individually, us as a family, or Parker's path. What I know is that our family is full of love and admiration for each other. Parker is such a sweet and loving boy. Thank you God for letting us be his parents. No matter what happens, God gives us the strength to get through our days together. I love my children more than anything in the world. I have four great boys-all special in their own individual way. I have a great husband who supports us and allows me to stay home to raise our children and give more time to Parker.

Parker Carden is now 20 months old. His kidneys function at about 60 percent of normal range. He will be confined to a wheelchair before he can walk. But he has the immortal love of his family, and the protection of God.

This is one powerful story of family commitment and strength, shared in a time when values of life, faith, and family are at risk more than any other time in history.

Michele Bachmann and the Conservative Future

GOP Representative Michele Bachmann, from Minnesota's 6th District, has lost a double-digit lead to Democratic challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg following her appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews on October 17.

A new poll finds Elwynn with a slight, statistically-insignificant lead over Bachmann, 45-43 percent.

Bachmann's under fire for criticizing the Democratic nominee, saying, for example, "the people who Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large." The ensuing left-wing backlash has engulfed her campaign and put her political career in jeopardy.

As noted, I made a contribution to Bachmann's reelection campaign the other day.

I've been moved by the controversy surrounding, as I see Bachmann as an embattled foot-soldier in the culture wars following September 11, 2001, which have now reached manic pitch on the eve of the presidential election.

Bachmann's been eviscerated by the netroots left and its allies in the liberal press corps, and she's taped a new campaign advertisement saying, "I may not always get my words right but I know that my heart is right because my heart is for you, for your children and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country."

This is not the big "apology" some folks on the left were anticipating, and I'm glad: Bachmann's got nothing to be ashamed of, and no need to apologize:

• When the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, gets up to the podium and proclaims, "The Iraq war is lost!" in an effort to counteract any positive consequences of an upcoming change in strategy, is that pro-American?
• When "Jihad Jack" Murtha scores a propaganda victory for Jihadists who are killing our soldiers by unjustly and without evidence labelling Marines "cold blooded murderers," is that likewise pro-American?
• When an entire party, in the name of politics, tries to undermine the efforts of our troops in harms' way during wartime, is that pro-American?
• When Obama's long-time self-confessed mentor and pastor of over 20 years stands in the pulpit and screams, "G*D DAMN AMERICA!" is that being pro-American?
• When another long-time Obama Associate, William Ayers, bombs the pentagon and other targets, and later regrets only that he didn't cause more murder and mayhem, is that also pro-American?

But notice the video above, which features Bachmann in a congressional district debate in November 2005. During the talk Bachmann proclaims that "not all cultures are equal," to which the Huffington Post responds:

One comment she has never explained came during a debate she had while running for Congress the first time in November 2005. Prompted by a question on the rioting in France and Europe at the time, Bachmann said "not all cultures are equal, not all values are equal," letting it be known that she thought that people of the Muslim faith had an inferior culture to that of the United States and the West.

She held forth on the European unrest, referring to a generation of unassimilated Muslim French youth addicted to cable television, led in her imagination by al Jazeera to wreak havoc. Yet it was Bachmann who seemed entranced by cable news. Her knowledge of what was actually happening in France seems to have come entirely from a FOX news-style script. In fact, the unrest was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture or al Jazeeera. It was more akin to the riots in the U.S. for expanded civil rights in the 1960s or those that followed from the Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles in 1991. The European riots came after two suburban youth were killed in a police chase. The unrest centered on decades of discrimination that had manifested itself, for example, in school acceptances and hiring practices and police force racial profiling.

Actually, that's not quite accurate.

In fact, Bachmann pretty much nails the analysis, and Huffington Post is spinning Bachmann's comments as a purportedly earlier example of beyond-the-pale extremism.

Note, for example, Robert Leiken's analysis in, "Europe's Angry Muslims," from the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs:

Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals - eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.

Also, here's Robert Spencer rebutting the notion that "the unrest [of 2005] was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture":

Why have the riots happened? From many accounts one would think that the riots have been caused by France’s failure to implement Marxism....

One might get the impression from this that France is governed by top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalists, building their fortunes on the backs of the poor, rather than by socialists and quasi-socialists who have actually strained the economy by spending huge amounts of money on health and welfare programs. Nor does the idea that the rioting has been caused by economic inequalities explain why Catholics and others who are poor in France have not joined the Muslims who are rioting. Of course, all the news agencies have either omitted or mentioned only in passing that the rioters are Muslims at all. The casual reader would not be able to escape the impression that what is happening in France is all about economics — and race.

Compare Spencer to Bachmann's intitial comments in the video:

I just want to say only in France, only in France could you have suburban youth rioting because the welfare benefits aren't generous enough. And that's... That's what they're telling us now is happening there. And only in France could that happen.

Representative Bachmann is more attuned to France's "Muslim street" than are her detractors on the radical left.

And that's why I've contributed to her campaign, and I hope others will as well (go to Bachmann's campaign page, here).

Michele Bachmann's fighting the fight conservatives need to wage. She's now a bit chastened by the backlash, but as the comments in her new advertisment indicate, she's sticking to "what's right in her heart."

That's a stand for traditional values, a stand for ideals, and a refusal to cave to intense political pressures from nihilist moral relativists.

Unfortunately, two-thirds in the Minnesota National Public Radio poll disagree with Bachmann's comments on Barack Obama's radical associations, for more reasons than I can discuss here.

Thus, in the microcosm of American politics that is Minnesota's 6th congressional district, we're seeing the battle for the conservative soul unfold in miniature, at the level of an individual GOP policy-maker beseiged by the hordes of moral equivalence who're now emboldened by the prospects of a Barack Obama administration, a candidate who will represent the very values against which Bachmann's so courageously warned.

The Economic Consequences of Obama

Here's the powerful new anti-Obama ad from Let Freedom Ring:

See also, Investor's Business Daily, "The Audacity of Socialism."

Neoconservative Racism?

One day after declaring himself a socialist radical, Matthew Yglesias has one of more disturbing titles for a post I've seen: "Neoconservatism Today, Neoconservatism Tomorrow, Neoconservatism Forever!

Yglesias is attacking Charles Krauthammer's endorsement today of John McCain for president (a fabulous read, by the way). He first trots out the old antiwar tripe on the Bush administration's foreign policy:

America’s standing in the eyes of the world is at its lowest ebb ever. Our level of influence in Latin America has declined precipitously on Bush’s watch. Israel’s security is more at risk than it was eight years ago, and Palestinian suffering is more intense than it was eight years ago. Osama bin Laden remains at large.

Yeah, yeah ... where have I heard that before?

Next follows Yglesias' neocon excoriation:

We’ve been following Krauthammer’s advice for years. Has it delivered a peaceful and secure world? No, it has not. Not just according to me, but according to Krauthammer himself. To Krauthammer the “solution” to the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years was neoconservatism. With neoconservatism having created a dangerous and insecure world, his solution is — more neoconservatism. And yet somehow it’s supposed to be the people who want to stop pursuing failed policies who are said to be blind to the troubled nature of the present.

Readers may recall that I've read Yglesias' Heads in the Sands, and I'm unimpressed (but don't take my word for it, see Jamie Kirchick's devastating indictment of the book). So, I guess it takes one advocate of a "failed approach" to understand another.

The problem: Krauthammer's inconsistent, with all due respect. In an essay back in late-2006, when the U.S. was facing the darkest times in Iraq, Krauthammer proclaimed the end of U.S. international hegemony:

What is becoming clear is that the overall international strategic situation in which we had unchallenged hegemony for the first decade and half the unipolar moment is now over. We are seeing on the horizon the rise of something that is always expected in any unipolar era, which is an alliance of others who oppose us.

Krauthammer's claim was not only wrong, but rather disheartening, considering he wrote what I considered some of the most importantt tracts on the theory underlying the Bush Doctrine, "The Unipolar Moment Revisited." Of course, Krauthammer's earlier works might be having a lingering effect on Yglesias, despite the fact that the WaPo columnist appeared at one point as a fair-weather neocon.

That said, what's particular disgusting here is the title to Yglesias' post, which draws on Alabama Governor George Wallace's Inaugural Address, January 14, 1963:

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . seregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Yglesias makes no specific reference to a racial nexus in neoconservative ideology.

But with his radical associations and demonic attacks on American foreign policy in the Bush years, the logical implication is that Yglesias adopts the same type of theory of American history as does William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn: The United States is irredeemably racist, at home and abroad, and in some twist of logical contortion, Charles Krauthammer, a Jewish psychiatrist and one-time researcher to President Jimmy Carter, fits into that alleged abmonation of American imperialism like a puzzle piece.

Toward a Rightroots Movement?

While I don't discount a further last-minute tightening in the presidential race, nor even a McCain victory, I'm excited about the GOP rebuilding movement that's already underway among conservative commentators.

Here's this from The Next Right:

Aaron Shaw at Fringe Thoughts responds to some things Patrick Ruffini and I have written recently.

A few recent posts at The Next Right have confirmed that John Henke and Patrick Ruffini are the only conservative bloggers I know of seriously considering how to build a netroots movement on the right. [...] The irony here is that Henke’s (and Ruffini’s) analysis mirrors the claims made by Markos Moulitsas over the past five years on Daily Kos as well as in his books Taking On the System and Crashing the Gate.

Actually, I don't think it's ironic at all that the analysis of problems on the Right is similar to the arguments made by the Netroots Left. For one thing, the "claims made by Markos Moulitsas" are in many ways intentional recycling of the movement on the Right.

The underlying systemic inputs are very similar. The political/electoral culture and incentives, and the emergence of the internet as an important social and technological phenomenon impacted both the Left and Right at approximately the same time.

The difference in uptake and evolution is predominantly due to the political cycle. Democrats went through the wilderness from 1995 to 2003; they found their way from 2003 to 2008. Republicans entered their wilderness in 2007, though I would argue that the Right has been in the wilderness for longer. How long the Right wanders in the wilderness depends, in large part, on how seriously they take the lessons they can learn from the Left.

I have to say, right away, that the comparison to Daily Kos is not only disgusting, but inaccurate and unproductive as well.

Markos Moulitsas is a diabolical loser. Over the past year, I've chronicled a number Kos posts that constitute some of the most represhensible political commentary on the web.

A quick check, for example, indicates that the annihilationist anti-Semitic post, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel," remains available at Daily Kos - and that's just one example. Conservatives will not emulate that level of hatred, I guarantee it.

Not only that, Kos failed badly in his efforts to elect Ned Lamont to the Senate in 2006, and the record for House races is mixed (or at least it's awfully hard to generalize from a single case of success).

Certainly the online model of campaign fundraising that the netroots left is worthy of emulation, but web-based campaigning has origins that precede Markos Moulitsas' angry hordes.

Beyond that, on the deeper question of whether GOP partisans will organize as well as those on the Democratic-left have over the last few years, just repeat three words before answering: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.

McCain Volunteer Admits Maiming Attack a Hoax

Well, I'm giving some credit to Kyle Moore here, whose suspicions proved accurate that the Ashley Todd attack and maiming story was a hoax.

Pittsburgh's KDKA has the report:

Police tell KDKA that a campaign volunteer has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter B in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.

Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.

Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and "the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction."

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

Keep in mind that both presidential campaigns responded to the story, with John McCain and Sarah Palin contacting Todd's family, and Barack Obama issuing a statement.

The netroots left will have a field day with this, and the liberal press will excoriate the GOP for its "Atwaterite" tactics, while conveniently forgetting the dozens upon dozen of vicious rumors against Sarah Palin and her family upon her announcement as McCain's running-mate.

Oh well, let the "reality-based community" bask in its nihilist righteousness for the day.

Meanwhile, we've got a campaign to win.

Ashley Todd Hoax Theory: Backward B?

UPDATE: Ashley Todd admits her story's a fraud, "McCain Volunteer Admits Maiming Attack a Hoax."

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Ace of Spades updates the Ashley Todd backward "B" hoax theory:

This speculation is silly.

Others have made this point, but Devil's Advocate at Copious Dissent took the simple step of turning the picture upside down to graphically demonstrate how ridiculous it is to keep talking about the backwards B.

There are so many sensible explanations for this that to cry "hoax" over this one point is silly.

Allahpundit notes that Ms. Todd has now taken a polygraph, but authorities have not released the results:

Why not release the details of the polygraph? If she passed it, it’s mighty irresponsible to suppress that information while whispering to the press about “inconsistencies” in her story.

The local CBS news-video report from Pittsburgh is here.

See also, "Words Fail: McCain Backer Maimed by Pro-Obama Attacker."

More later...

Obama's International Crisis

Here's John McCain's new ad buy, "Ladies and Gentlemen":

This is powerful, although it remains to be seen how much traction this message gets as the economic crisis continues.

See Captain Ed for a little more optimism.

Loving America Means Having Small-Town Values

There's a lot of talk this election about anti-Obama dog-whistles and coded racial language.

But this essay by Rosa Brooks, on Sarah Palin's recent "pro-America" commnents, really got me thinking:

According to Sarah Palin, she and John McCain "believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."

Um, very, um. ... Yeah....

The GOP code isn't hard to crack: There's the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there's the "real" America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are ... well ... white.

I sometimes don't know what it is with lefttists, but for conservatives to speak of traditional values - heartland values - as racist by default is bothersome, if not sickening.

Brooks notes this interesting statistic in making the case against small-town values:

About 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, not small towns. A third of us are ethnic and racial minorities, but that's changing: Already,nearly 45% of children under 5 are minorities. Although 88%of us believe in God, 70% think that religions other than our own are equally valid routes to truth. And while 59% of us think that wearing an American flag pin is a decent way to show patriotism, even more of us (66%) think that protesting U.S. policies we oppose is a good way to show patriotism. These days, more than half of us say we prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Given this, why do McCain, Palin and their team keep pushing the message that the America where most of the electorate lives isn't "real"?

Eighty percent of Americans live in the cities?

That sounds like an awfully high number, so I checked around: The left-wing Brookings Institution published a piece a couple of weeks back seeking to debunk Palin's talk of "small-town America." The essay, "A Small-Town or Metro Nation?", has this:

Wasilla, Alaska, is currently the most famous small town in America, thanks to its former mayor Sarah Palin. A healthy part of her appeal is that she seems to embody small-town values, nurtured in Wasilla and America's other hamlets and burgs. As she said in her firecracker acceptance speech, small-town people live lives of "honesty, sincerity, and dignity" and "do some of the hardest work in America."

Palin was tapping into a widespread belief that small-town America represents the country at large. In April 2008, as the Democratic primary contest ground through Pennsylvania, Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal declared that "Rural and small-town voters are the best indicators of whether a candidate is connecting with the values of Middle America. 'They are America,' says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. ... 'If you can speak to [them], then you relate to the rest of America.'"

But the idea that we are a nation of small towns is fundamentally incorrect. The real America isn't found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropolitan areas or "metros" that bring all these places into economic and social union. Palin's positioning may appeal to a certain nostalgia that Americans have about small-town life, but the Manichean dichotomy of city versus small town (not to mention "urban" candidate versus "rural" one) no longer describes the radically connected and interdependent way Americans live and work....

Two-thirds of our population lives in the top 100 metropolitan areas, and 84 percent of Americans live in all 363 metros. Being in a metro means being tied to someplace else; the Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas as a city of 50,000 or more, plus the adjacent counties that have close social and economic ties to the urban core.

There's a big problem with this analysis.

It's a longstanding truism of American politics that culture is language, or more specifically, an epistemic language of cultural identity defines the political orientation of ideological communities.

Conservative have long spoken in terms of "race, rights, and taxes," which fulfilled the normative function of deligitmizing Democratic Party welfare politics as outside the mainstream of American values. Was there a racial component to this? Perhaps. But more importantly, to the extent there's been a legitimate element of race in politics, the larger opposition to the entitlement, big-government agenda that goes along with it remains the driving spur of socio-cultural affirmation for those on the political right.

Bill Clinton knew this when he dissed Sister Soljah in 1992 and passed welfare reform in 1996. Hillary Clinton knew this during the primaries that Barack Obama was having difficulties "among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," that is, traditional white working-class constituencies.

So, the question is not how many people live in defined urban/rural and metropolitan/nonmetropolitan census tracks. It's the types of values people adopt, which are less contingent on geographic space than the predominant socio-cultural attributes and traditions that define traditional heartland communities.

As Geoff Nunberg argues, America has been urbanizing for over 100 years, but we still love our small-town - "mainstreet" - values:

When Sarah Palin calls herself a main streeter, she isn't saying just that she's ordinary or middle-class. She's suggesting that her small-town background has given her a special insight into our core values -- she can see America from her window. In response, Joe Biden pumps up his own Main Street cred by mentioning his frequent trips to Home Depot and his youth in Scranton and a Delaware steel town.

In the introduction to his novel, Sinclair Lewis wrote that Main Street is "our comfortable tradition and sure faith." That hasn't changed; 80 years after it was coined, "Wall Street vs. Main Street" is still a potent political slogan. We still feel the need to write our moral differences on our geography, so we can put some literal distance between ourselves and the bad guys.

The problem for the Democratic-left is not so much that Sarah Palin campaigns on a platform appealing to "small-town" values. It's that the Democratic Party is explicitly hostile to those values, and its advocates are relegated to citing raw numbers of urban dwellers rather than recognizing that while you can take a country boy to the city, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

Words Fail: McCain Backer Maimed by Pro-Obama Attacker

UPDATE: Ashley Todd admits her story's a fraud, "McCain Volunteer Admits Maiming Attack a Hoax."

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UPDATE: See, "Ashley Todd Hoax Theory: Backward B?"

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I would say this is shocking, but we're beyond that place in American politics today.

********ADDED: Video via Newsbusters:

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At some level, the Obama phenomenon has worked some bedevilment into society's lower quarters, as evidenced by Ashley Todd, who was allegedly attacked and maimed by a supporter of Barack Obama:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.

Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

Can we make broader generalizations from this case? Probably not, although Todd's mutilation was clearly politically motivated.

Ace of Spades initially suggested the story was a hoax, but as more information came in, he deleted those passages, saying:

CNN will quote me when they say "Even conservatives smell a hoax..." CNN only quotes conservative blogs when they make points helpful to the liberal cause. I've been quoted there three times and it's always been to attack Republicans. They've never once found me quite so interesting when I'm, say, noting Barack Obama's unprecedented voter and donor fraud.

So, yes, there's certainly much political weight to this story, however folks want to spin it.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Ashley Todd.

See also, Wake Up America, "Obama Supporter Attacks McCain Supporter and Carves Letter B Into Her Face."

UPDATE: Captain Ed addresses the "hoax" issue:

I spoke with two executives at the College Republicans on the record about this story. Charlie Smith, the National Chair, and Ethan Eilon, the Executive Director, both say the photo is legitimate and that it came from Ashley Todd, the victim in this case. The attack began at 8:50 pm ET and Ashley called the police at 9:30 PM ET. Initially, she was robbed, ran away after the robbery, and the robber followed her to her car. At that point, he became enraged at the bumper sticker and began beating her and scratched the ‘B’ into her face. Ashley went to the hospital early this morning after initially refusing medical attention last night, and had an MRI and/or a CAT scan. Doctors believe her cheek will heal fully.

I'm interested in the backward "B", which Kyle Moore says is a dead givaway for a fake attack:

She is then punched, kicked, and has the letter B carved backwards in her face. Again, the backwards bit is a pretty big deal because either her attacker was not just convenient enough to be big, black, scary, and an Obama supporter, but also dyslexic (Go ahead, just write a B backwards. I’m not saying it’s impossible, or even difficult. But it is something you have to physically think about–you have to intentionally write it backwards, and I find it highly suspect that someone in the thrill of the moment is going to take the time to stop and think about carving that B backwards).

A further note on that letter B. Though it is backwards, it is nearly perfect.

It’s not jagged, there are no off shooting lines you might expect if you are struggling for your life, which is what you would be doing in this kind of situation (No, seriously, you would go into fight or flight at this point). Even if the assailant had control of the victims head, she would likely move around enough to get the assailant to err at least once.

This attack has the lefties worried, in any case. It's a potential Pennsylvania Willie Horton game-changer for the Keystone State.