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StumbleLETTER TO THE EDITOR:
Charm no substitute for qualifications
Sunday, Oct. 5, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.
After listening to the vice presidential debate, I came away with the same fear I had during eight years of the Bush administration. When it comes to a debate, the Republican candidates have been taught very well — if you can’t answer the moderator’s question, talk about something else. Also, if your opponent responds to you with facts, just ignore it and go on with your canned messages.
A perfect example of this was when Joe Biden pointed out that Barack Obama and John McCain both voted against a flawed funding bill for the war in Iraq. Gov. Sarah Palin, the automaton that she is, went on with the same canned script that Barack Obama voted against funding the troops. (Don’t hit me with facts, I have a message to deliver!)
It is obvious that Sarah Palin was well-rehearsed and ready with the same references about her and John McCain’s being for “Joe Six-Pack,” being a “soccer mom” and of course both her and John McCain’s being “mavericks.” Give me a break!
I think it is obvious Palin looks good and can sound good if she sticks to the script, but God help us if we expect her to lead the country and make decisions on her own. “W” won his debates and look where it got us.
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The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.
ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
In 2006, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all of the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the "worst case of election fraud in our state's history." As Fox News reported:
"The ACORN workers told state investigators thatthey made up names, addresses, and Social Security numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book.
ACORN members have been prosecuted for voter fraud in a number of states. (See www.rottenacorn.com.) Their philosophy seems to be that everyone deserves the right to vote, whether legal or illegal, living or dead.
ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. Acorn pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of "dragging banks kicking and screaming" into dubious loans. "Thus we have J.P. Morgan & Co., the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN." Is this a great country or what? As conservative community activist Robert Woodson put it, "The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN."
ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff -- the very people who would later descend on Chicago's banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, ditto. Obama was not just sympathetic -- he was an ACORN fellow traveler.
Now you could make the case that before 2008, well-intentioned people were simply unaware of what their agitation on behalf of non-credit-worthy borrowers could lead to. But now? With the whole financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to fund their friends at ACORN? And, unashamed, they then trot out to the TV cameras to declare "the party is over" for Wall Street (Nancy Pelosi)? The party should be over for the Democrats who brought us to this pass. If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.
JERUSALEM -- The board of a nonprofit organization on which Sen. Barack Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist granted funding to a controversial Arab group that mourns the establishment of Israel as a "catastrophe" and supports intense immigration reform, including providing drivers licenses and education to illegal aliens.
The co-founder of the Arab group in question, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, also has held a fundraiser for Obama. Khalidi is a harsh critic of Israel, has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror and reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group.
In 2001, the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for which Khalidi's wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002.
Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website. According to tax filings, Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.
Obama served on the Wood's Fund board alongside William C. Ayers, a member of the Weathermen terrorist group which sought to overthrow of the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971.
Ayers, who still serves on the Woods Fund board, contributed $200 to Obama's senatorial campaign fund and has served on panels with Obama at numerous public speaking engagements. Ayers admitted to involvement in the bombings of U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
OBAMA LIES ABOUT RELATIONSHIP WITH TERRORISTS
In spite of Sen. Barack Obama's claims to the contrary, the Democratic presidential nominee had a close working relationship with former Weathermen terrorist leader William Ayers when the two served alongside each other on a hundred-million-dollar education foundation, according to the group's own archived records.
The records also show Obama's and Ayers' foundation granted money to radical leftist activist causes.
News reports, archived records, interviews and Ayers' own curriculum vitae document that Ayers was the founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, which bills itself as a school reform organization. Ayers also served as co-chairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC, from its formation in 1995 until 2000.
In 1995, Obama was appointed as the CAC's first chairman.
In response to a query by National Review Online writer Stanley Kurtz, the Obama campaign issued a statement claiming Ayers was not involved with Obama's "recruitment" to the CAC board. The statement said Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham, who served as presidents of other foundations, recruited Obama.
Last April, Obama dismissed Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis."
But Kurtz reviewed the CAC archives at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which houses CAC board meeting minutes and other documentation from the education foundation. He found that along with Leff and Graham, Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board of the CAC, which hired Obama.
Keep spamming, tokaloshe. No one cares about your unreferenced nonsense.
BTW, Palin is NOT "charming". She's about as insincere and phony as one can get.
Seems as if that's one of the requirements to be part of the right wing.
Palin is such a lightweight that I can see right through her to Russia. What a robot. Keep hiding her from the press. And tokaloshe, stay off of those hate Web sites.
tokaloshe's posts are only the beginning. As McCain's sun sinks slowly into the west he will sink further and further with it. He knows his only chance to win this election is to trash Obama any way he can. We ain't seen nothing yet.
It's just funny that some people just keep posting posting posting without any response.
These aren't monologues, Post once, maybe twice if you forgot something, but to keep going....I'm not sure if it's belligerent or the desire to keep talking to no one in particular.