Monday, Oct. 13, 2008 Interesting Items 10/13 -
Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy - In this issue: 1. Campaign 2. Michigan 3. ACORN 4. Hacker 5. Troopergate 1. Campaign. First, the bad news: Zogby this morning reported The One up by 4% - with a 48% - 44% lead. No bad for a miserable last couple weeks by the McCain campaign. Real Clear Politics composite poll shows the lead at 7%. In comparison, this time in 2004, John Kerry had a 3-4% lead. In 2000, President Bush held a 2% lead that evaporated quickly following the Maine DUI story. The difference between those elections and this one? We had a better candidate then – one who apparently wanted to win by defeating the other side rather than trying to get along with them. A few random observations: McCain has consistently refused to tie this economic crash around the collective throats of congressional democrats and their cronies in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They know they are in trouble, as I have seen several stories over the course of the last week attempting to make the point that minorities were not the cause of the mortgage crisis. It appears that there is not a single person on the McCain campaign staff that knows anything about economics – which is pretty interesting given that Steve Forbes and Phil Gramm are both part of his economic advisors. Obama is running around lying through his teeth about who his tax increases will hit. The fact is that they will body slam everyone, as the math computing his tax cuts counts grants made to those that do not pay income taxes as tax cuts rather than brand new welfare payments. He claims that 95% of all of us will get tax relief which is laughable. The last democrat the nation trusted to make a middle class tax cut was the Slickmeister himself, and he only took a couple minutes after the 1992 election to decide that there simply wasn't enough money to cut taxes for anyone, so he and the democrat congress decided to slam through a massive tax increase on everyone. Do we want to go through that again? McCain's crowds are increasingly fired up, with the most notable example being an appearance in Wisconsin Friday where McCain was taken to task for not taking on the socialism coming out of Washington DC. McCain decided to be McCain and defend Obama from the crowd and was roundly and deservedly booed. He doesn't get it. He is in competition with a political party that wants to destroy him just as surely as his Vietnamese captors wanted to destroy him. He ought to do something about it. The campaign energy appears to be completely on the right, but it is being tamped down by the ineptness of the McCain campaign. One of the cases that McCain ought to make is that the economic problem has its roots and foundation in Washington. Obama thinks the entire nation is broken, and in the eyes of a committed socialist like him, I suppose it is. Make the campaign about whom or what needs to be fixed. Should McCain take up the cudgel and demand that Washington be fixed rather than every single one of the rest of us, he wins in a landslide. Will he do it? Who knows. SNL did a blistering sketch on the bailout and collapse of the subprime mortgage industry. They went after Pelosi and Barney Frank by name. They went after large democrat fundraisers by name. The sketch was posted on You Tube for a short time, removed, corporately scrubbed – removing the Barney Frank ridicule completely – and returned it to the online community a few days later. The excuse by the NBC corporate lefties was that it was not up to their professional standards. Fortunately, there were copies made, which is always a Good Thing. Finally, for those interested in speculation, one wonders what the Clintons are up to these days. If Obama wins, Hillary will never make it to the WH. So the Clintons have only a couple choices left to them over the course of the next three weeks. One would be to slyly defeat Obama via their chosen and perfected method of leaking damaging stuff through friendly leftist media. The ACORN investigation may be such a thing. The other choice would be for Hillary to take over as Senate Leader and run the entire show from the Senate. This last is not outside the realm of possibility, for she could certainly make Obama's life absolutely miserable with a series of investigations and create a failure to push his legislation over the courts over the next 1-8 years. 2. Michigan. This one is a couple weeks old, but the McCain campaign announced they were pulling out of Michigan. VP Nominee Palin volunteered to go into Michigan with her husband (and union member) Todd Palin and start working the factories. If it were me, I would be putting the Palins in the Rust Belt, working the union towns and trying to turn that part of the country. This would include the states of Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Who knows, they may actually end up being there the last week or so of the campaign. 3. ACORN. ACORN is now being investigated for massive voter fraud in over 10 states – most of them battleground states - this election cycle. ACORN is an interesting outfit, as it exists on the federal handout, yet sits at the center of the subprime mess and has a long history of voter fraud. The big surprise is that these stories are coming out today rather than in January 2009. The fraudulent registrations have been so large in number and so obvious that some observers are wondering if it is intended simply to overwhelm the existing voter registration system and cover something more subtle going on underneath the surface. Minority Leader John Boehner (R, CA) announced his intention to remove all federal funding from ACORN in future years. The Obama campaign knows this is a growing problem, and now has removed all connections between Obama from his web site. Obama himself, who actually worked for ACORN as a lawyer, is now denying all past ties to the organization. 4. Hacker. The son of a Tennessee democrat state legislator was indicted last week for hacking the Yahoo e-mail account belonging to Governor Sarah Palin. The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine. I do not think this young man will enjoy his time inside Club Fed or wherever he ends up being sent. 5. Troopergate. The Branchflower investigation into Governor Palin's firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan was released Friday. It concluded that Palin had abused power by allowing her husband to complain and pressure Monegan to fire their former brother in law. It also concluded that Plain had every right to fire Monegan and did so lawfully. Predictably, all the usual media suspects did all the usual media things, running stories the next day that Palin was guilty, guilty, I say, of abuse of power. Palin released a statement the next day that claimed the report completely exonerated her. This report presents a rather interesting interpretation of the state ethics law. Branchflower believes that the law removes the right of any family member to petition any state employee for redress – which has never been addressed by the legislature or adjudicated at any level by any body in the state. He also creatively applied the ethics laws by suggesting that Todd Palin's complaints to Monegan personally benefited him. On the other hand, the state tells any citizen who has a problem with any state trooper to make their complaints directly to the Commissioner's office – which Todd Palin did, making Palin guilty of violating state ethics rules by not controlling her husband in his actions as a private citizen. So the question remains: exactly what rights do you have and what do you lose when a family member is elected or appointed to a state position? The Legislative Council was at a loss Friday to figure out where to go next with all of this stuff. The Palin opponents believe they have their smoking gun. Palin supporters and Palin herself believe this exonerates her completely. From my perspective it is yet another example of how the left in general and democrats in particular have managed to perfect the art of political warfare by turning political disagreements on policy into criminal investigations. This must not be allowed to stand, as it benefits the left in particular and destroys the body politic and the political system in general. More later - - AG "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776. Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations: MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com ; District 28 http://www.dist28.com/ , subscriber and supporter Elbert Collins at http://thatselbert.wordpress.com/ and the home page: http://home.gci.net/~agimarc Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column: http://www.thevanguard.org/ ------------------------------ I'M MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE. http://www.thepetit ionsite.com/ 1/recall- the-congress- of-this-united- states<http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/recall-the-congress-of-this-united-states> ------------------------------ Would you like to help organize a march on Washington like the one that successfully brought an end to Viet war? If we don't fire Washington, who will? For details, send email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rich Martin ------------------------------
