BlogWonks

Massachusetts state senator Diane Wilkerson has just been indicted for 8 counts of attempted extortion.

Prosecutors filed a criminal complaint in October alleging Sen. Dianne Wilkerson accepted cash payments between June 2007 and October 2008. The formal grand jury indictment was handed down Tuesday.

The indictment also seeks the forfeiture of the more than $23,500 in payments allegedly made to the Boston Democrat by undercover agents and a cooperating witness during the 18-month investigation.

If convicted, Wilkerson faces up to 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine on each of the eight charges.

Wilkerson, who is free on a $50,000 unsecured bond, has said there is “more to this story.”

Yeah, you sleaze, I’m sure there is “more to this story”. Nothing that will exonerate you, but it may be somewhat amusing to hear the rest of it.

I wrote  last night about Eric Holder’s poor judgment regarding  several matters he dealt with when he was Assistant AG in the Clinton Justice Department.  But, as it turns out, poor judgment isn’t his only problem. Eric Holder is also  a lying sack of you know what.

One of my favorite Eric Holder stories involves his role in the Justice Department’s handling of the Elian Gonzalez case.  In the period before armed agents seized the child, the Justice Department had been leaking its intention to avoid any sort of armed intervention.  It would all be done quietly, they suggested.  When top Department officials were asked about it, they said nothing to change that impression.  About two weeks before the raid, Tim Russert asked Holder, “You wouldn’t send a SWAT team in the dark of night to kidnap the child, in effect?”  Holder answered, “No, we don’t expect anything like that to happen.”  Then the Department did precisely that. The day after the seizure, Holder appeared again with Russert, who asked, “Why such a dramatic change in position?” “I’m not sure I’d call it a dramatic change,” Holder answered.  “We waited ’til five in the morning, just before dawn.”

Great. Send armed SWAT guys to break  the door down and grab a little kid during the night after you promised you wouldn’t do it. And, then  send him back to one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes in the world. Do we really want someone this  disingenuous running the Obama DOJ? Never mind, it was a rhetorical question. Besides, the media will absolutely love this  guy.

Barack Obama promised us “change we can believe in”. So, who’s he hired for his administration so far? Nothing but former Bill Clinton staffers like John Podesta, Rahm Emanuel, and now Eric Holder, who has just been asked to be Obama’s Attorney General. Change, where’s the change?

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has conditionally offered Eric Holder the job as attorney general, and the former top Clinton administration official has accepted, a senior Democrat said on Tuesday.

Before the offer becomes official, Obama’s team wants to determine if Holder could win Senate confirmation with broad bipartisan support and clean up a Justice Department wracked by scandals during George W. Bush’s presidency, the Democrat said.

“We know we have the votes for Senate confirmation, but we want to make sure he would have broad support so he can make needed reforms,” said the Democrat, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

Since Obama’s election two weeks ago, the 57-year-old Holder, the deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, has emerged as the top candidate for the job as the nation’s top law enforcement and legal officer who deals with issues like terrorism and crime.

Eric Holder comes with some very serious baggage. Holder approved Bill Clinton’s pardon of that total dirtball and fugitive from justice Marc Rich. Holder also facilitated the forced deportation of Elian Gonzalez without having a court order allowing him to do so.  Holder was also involved with efforts by the Clinton Justice Department to force banks into making mortgage loans to minorities who couldn’t really afford the loans in the first place (sound familiar?) Eric Holder has shown exceptionally poor judgment in these matters, and I find it troubling that this is the guy that Obama wants running the Department of Justice.

NRO has much more on Holder, particularly on the story behind Holder’s support for Marc Rich’s pardon. Eric Holder did not just approve of Bill Clinton’s pardon, as many people believe. Holder actually helped lobby Bill Clinton on behalf of the Rich family to get this outrageous pardon facilitated.

Much has been made, and appropriately so, of Holder’s untoward performance in the final corrupt act of the Clinton administration: the pardons issued in the departing president’s final hours. Of these, most notorious is the case of Marc Rich, an unrepentant fugitive wanted on extensive fraud, racketeering, and trading-with-the-enemy charges — but granted a pardon nonetheless thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife, a generous donor to Clinton’s library and legal-defense fund.

Holder’s role was aptly described as “unconscionable” by a congressional committee. He steered Rich’s allies to retain the influential former White House counsel Jack Quinn (Holder later conceded he hoped Quinn would help him become attorney general in a Gore administration); he helped Quinn directly lobby Clinton, doing an end-run around the standard pardon process (including DOJ’s pardon attorney); and he kept the deliberations hidden from the district U.S. attorney and investigative agencies prosecuting Rich so they couldn’t learn about the pardon application and register their objections.

Eric Holder also helped to get Bill Clinton’s pardon of 16 FALN terrorists accomplished as a way of pandering to the Puerto Rican community in New York City so that Hillary would have a better chance of winning New York’s senate seat.

There’s more. In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote.

Eric Holder is an exceptionally poor choice to serve as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. It may be time for the Senate GOP to try out their filibuster over this nomination.

It’s George Soros (surprise surprise).

Three blocks from the White House, on the 10th floor of a sleek glass building, young workers pound at computers, with giant flat-screen TVs overhead. It has the look and feel of a high-tech startup.

In many ways it is. The product is ideas.

Thanks in part to funding from benefactors such as billionaire George Soros, the Center for American Progress has become in just five years an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the new Obama administration.

Much as the Heritage Foundation provided intellectual heft for the Republican Party in the 1980s, CAP has been an incubator for liberal thought and helped build the platform that triumphed in the 2008 campaign.

“What CAP has done is recapture the role of ideas as an important political force, something the Republicans had been better at for 25 years,” said Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, a non-partisan policy-research organization in Washington.

CAP’s president and founder, John Podesta, 59, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, is one of three people running the transition team for president-elect Barack Obama, 47. A squadron of CAP experts is working with them.

In other words, you can forget about Obama’s claims to be “post-partisan”, just like we can laugh off Obama pretending  that he’s a moderate. We’re in for a very rough four years, and the moderate independent voters who pulled the lever for this guy are going to be sorely disappointed and embarrassed that they’ve been sold a bill of goods. Much more about the loony tunes at Center for American Progress here. For a “think tank”, they don’t seem to be doing a whole lot of thinking. Or, at least rational thinking anyway.

Here’s what the esteemed (cough cough)  Congressman Frank said regarding a proposed 25 billion dollar bailout of our incompetent, failing auto industry:

“The House is ready to do it,” said Democratic Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. “There’s no downside to trying.”

There’s no downside to trying? How about pissing away another 25 billion dollars of our money to temporarily postpone the imminent demise of these companies for 6 months or so? Surely we must have other more intellegent uses to put that money to, no?  Frank has proven time and time again, as when he refused to accept that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ready to implode and bring our economy down with them,  that he’s just dangerously clueless.

When Barack Obama was running for president he stated that lobbyists would have no place in his White House.

One year from now, we have the chance to tell all those corporate lobbyists that the days of them setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more to take on lobbyists than any other candidate in this race - and I’ve won. I don’t take a dime of their money, and when I am President, they won’t find a job in my White House. Because real change isn’t another four years of defending lobbyists who don’t represent real Americans - it’s standing with working Americans who have seen their jobs disappear and their wages decline and their hope for the future slip further and further away. That’s the change we can offer in 2008.

Well, we’ve been conned again, as it’s now clear that many key positions on Obama’s transition team are indeed lobbyists.

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to change Washington, vowing to upend the K Street lobbying culture he encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate.

But more than a dozen members of President-elect Obama’s fast-growing transition team have worked as federally registered lobbyists within the past four years. They include former lobbyists for the nation’s trial lawyers association, mortgage giant Fannie Mae, drug companies such as Amgen, high-tech firms such as Microsoft, labor unions and the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress.

Mark Gitenstein, one of the 12 transition board members who will play a significant role in shaping the Obama administration, worked on million-dollar lobbying contracts with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and promoted legislation for giant defense contractors Boeing and General Dynamics. Until this fall, he was registered to petition Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission on behalf of AT&T, Merrill Lynch, KPMG, Ernst & Young and others.

Here’s the best line in the whole piece:

Toner said excluding lobbyists altogether never struck him as advisable.

“Campaign rhetoric is one thing,” he said. “You’ve got to have serious people who know the inner workings of government.”

In other words, it’s okay to lie your ass off during your campaign.  Just some more “change we can believe in”.

Some healthy banks are asking for bailout money even though they don’t need it.

MetroCorp Bancshares is one that has applied to participate in the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Assets Relief Program, which is meant to inject capital into banks and get them lending again, even though it’s well-capitalized.

“With the uncertainty moving ahead for the Houston economy, it just would be prudent to have additional capital,” said David Choi, chief financial officer of the $1.6 billion bank.

The bank is looking to use the money to help shore up capital in case energy prices keep dropping and drag Houston’s economy with them.

A steadily appreciating housing market and strong oil and natural gas prices in recent years helped keep the economy — and its banks — strong relative to the rest of the nation.

The exception so far has been Franklin Bank SSB, which regulators seized last week after it failed largely because of troubled real estate loans it made in California and other parts of the country riddled with housing woes.

While local banks may not need the money, they don’t want to pass up an opportunity for cheap capital that would allow them to make more loans or acquire other banks.

Uh, dude. You’re a publicly traded corporation. If you need capital, get it from your shareholders by raising equity, or selling bonds. You have no damn business asking the taxpayers of the United States to recapitalize your company which doesn’t even need to be recapitialized in the first place.

So tough now that British alcoholics can’t afford to drink in pubs anymore.

Robert Munro buys his booze at London liquor stores these days. As his expenses rise and Britain teeters on the edge of recession, the house painter is cutting back on nights out and pouring drinks at home.

“It’s gotten more and more expensive to just head down to the pub for a drink,” said Munro, 55, who is self-employed. “You’re paying silly prices for a pint — you can drink at home for half the price.”

Five British pubs are closing their doors every day, according to the British Beer & Pub Association, as pound- pinching drinkers embrace staying in as the new going out. That may hurt beer companies like Heineken NV and Carlsberg A/S more than distillers, such as Diageo Plc, because the brewers generate the majority of their U.K. sales at bars, where profitability can be double the level in retail outlets.

Beer sales at pubs, known as “on-trade” in Britain, fell 8.1 percent in the third quarter, meaning 1.1 million fewer pints drunk per day, the BBPA says. “Steep declines in the on-trade are a problem for margins,” Joergen Rasmussen, chief executive officer of Carlsberg, said in relation to the U.K. market in a Nov. 5 interview. “Being the most profitable segment, it’s a problem for us and for everyone.”

Britain, whose economy contracted last quarter for the first time in 16 years, accounts for about 3 percent of the global beer market, according to researcher Canadean, and almost a tenth of the European market. Valby, Denmark-based Carlsberg’s British sales by volume will fall 3 percent next year, according to the average estimate of two analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

I blame the failed policies of the Bush administration.

As I and many others have written before, Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are close friends.

In a new afterword to his memoir, 1960s radical William Ayers describes himself as a “family friend” of President-elect Barack Obama and writes that the campaign controversy over their relationship was an effort by Obama’s political enemies to “deepen a dishonest narrative” about the candidate.

There’s something very seriously wrong when a complete scumbag like Bill Ayers is more honest than the President elect of the United States.

Why you might ask? Well, because in addition to spending over 600 million dollars of his own campaign money, plus 100 million dollars of the Democratic National Committee’s money, the DNC actually took out substantial loans for the Obama campaign that now need to be paid back!

The Ticket reported, jokingly, the other day about the latest Barack Obama fundraising appeal.

He’s the fellow who raised way more than $605 million and, would you believe it, won the presidential election campaign to bring real change to Washington.

As an important part of changing the money culture of Washington he was asking for another $30 donation from everyone on the e-mail list.

It seems that in addition to his 6/10ths of a billion dollars to move into the White House, the Democratic National Committee spent way more than the $100 million in cash it had raised.

In fact, it took out “substantial loans.”

Well, it turns out now, the DNC’s debts are far worse than originally imagined. Today, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe sent another urgent e-mail to supporters seeking at least another $30.

Apparently, the Obama campaign spent about a billion dollars on this election.  That’s a travesty any way you look at it.

I’ve already written several times about how maximum Obama campaign donor Helen Jones-Kelley okayed the use of state of Ohio computers to perpetrate a smear campaign on Joe the Plumber, as well as to help campaign actively for Obama on the state’s time. Now we find that (surprise surprise) Jones-Kelley wasn’t the only state of Ohio employee campaigning for Obama at the taxpayer’s expense.

Suspended agency director Helen Jones-Kelley isn’t the only Ohio government employee under investigation for allegedly dabbling in politics on state time.

Three employees of the Ohio Rehabilitation Services Commission are being investigated for possible violations of the federal law that prohibits engaging in political activity on government time or using official resources.

The employees work in the commission’s Bureau of Disability Determination, which rules on applications from Ohioans seeking Social Security disability benefits, said Steve Ostrander, a spokesman for the commission.

Ostrander would not name the employees, nor could he say which political campaign or campaigns they allegedly worked on while on duty.

Jones-Kelley, the director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, was placed on paid leave on Friday after e-mail messages showed that she had used state resources to raise money for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The three Ohio Rehabilitation Services Commission employees remain on duty pending an internal investigation, Ostrander said.

Their alleged misconduct was brought to light in early October by the federal Social Security Administration, which operates the computer system and funds the budget of the Bureau of Disability Determination. The federal agency has the ability to monitor employee e-mail messages.

Social Security Administration officials declined to answer questions today.

Although the employees work for the state, they’re subject to the federal Hatch Act, which forbids politicking with government resources or while on the clock.

Gee, I guess Governor Ted Strickland’s statement that their was there “is no evidence of any systematic, wide-spread abuse of government resources” was complete bullshit then huh?

Because the Democrats are getting ready to ram it down your throats whether you like it or not. And, you won’t.

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday will release a sweeping proposal to overhaul the health-care system that largely reflects President-elect Barack Obama’s vision, increasing the chances for action next year.

There is one important difference between the initiative coming from Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus and the plan Mr. Obama laid out during his presidential campaign: Mr. Baucus would require all Americans to have health insurance, while Mr. Obama has rejected the idea of a mandate.

In that respect, the Baucus plan reflects the one put forward by Sen. Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries.

Still, Mr. Baucus’s ideas are largely similar to Mr. Obama’s as well, with a range of Democrats coalescing around an approach modeled on a plan now in place in Massachusetts. A key goal: health insurance for 46 million people in the U.S. who are currently without it.

“My door is open and I seek partners with ‘can do’ spirits and open minds,” Mr. Baucus wrote in an introduction to his 89-page plan. “I believe — very strongly — that every American has a right to high-quality health care…and I believe Americans cannot wait any longer.”

Like Mr. Obama, he proposes a national marketplace that he dubs the Health Insurance Exchange, in which individuals and small businesses could buy coverage, with subsidies based on income. Private insurers and a new Medicare-like public program would compete through the exchange to offer coverage.

Oh good, the plan will be modeled after the idiotic plan recently started in Massachusetts. You know, that plan that forces people to buy expensive health insurance that they can’t afford, and is already running way over budget. I can hardly wait to see what these guys come up with. I hope the GOP and the Blue Dog Democrats are ready for a fight because this is going to be total war.

If you were a large donator  to Mr. Hope and Change’s presidential campaign, there’s some more good news for you. You’ve just bought yourself a position as an advisor for the incoming Obama administration. Bet you didn’t see that one coming, huh?

President-elect Barack Obama is barring lobbyists from participating in the transition that will help install his administration. He will still leave room on his team for the rich and powerful.

Top fundraisers and other well-connected supporters will serve in an advisory capacity before the Democrat takes office on Jan. 20.

Five of the 12 members of Obama’s transition advisory board raised at least $50,000 for his presidential campaign, and eight contributed the maximum individual donation of $4,600. Other transition team members include a partner in a lobbying firm and two executives of financial companies whose employees were among his biggest donors.

“If an Obama administration is going to sell influence, these are the ones who have bought it,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a Washington-based advocacy group that favors stronger campaign-finance and lobbying laws.

Well, these bundlers helped Obama buy his way into the White House by outspending John McCain by six to one.  You gotta do something for them so they’ll be willing to put out again in 2012. Hope and change baby, hope and change!

Remember all those millions of dollars of illegal campaign contributions that went into the Obama campaign coffers from foreigners, as well as obviously fake people like Adolf Hitler, Noddarealperson and Doodad Pro? Well the Federal Elections Commission doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that, and they have no intention of even looking into it. But, since John McCain took public financing, he is going to be audited. How insane is that?

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

With all the election fraud going on in this country, this place is rapidly turning into a banana republic.

I guess she still had all this free time on her hands after she used state of Ohio computer systems to operate Barack Obama’s smear campaign on Joe the Plumber.

Among the e-mails that Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services, sent to the Obama for President campaign in July from her official government computer were two regarding a campaign event at Stivers School for the Arts.

The department released the e-mails Friday, Nov. 7, in response to a Ohio Public Records Law request.

The Dayton Daily News received the e-mails following their release to the Columbus Dispatch, which asked for any Jones-Kelley e-mails connected to then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The request followed reports that her department searched for internal records related to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, “Joe the Plumber,” after he became a prominent character in the presidential campaign. Jones-Kelley’s Obama-related e-mails are now in the hands of the Ohio Inspector General.

According to federal law, government officials are barred from using government resources such as computers in connection with political campaigns.

So now that we have even more proof of Helen Jones-Kelley being a criminal, something’s gonna be done about it right? Wait, don’t answer that. It was a purely rhetorical question. And the last paragraph of the article is absolutely priceless.

Mark Owens, chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Party, said, “Clearly, he (Strickland) is investigating it… You shouldn’t hang a person until you get all the facts. It’s an appropriate thing. There’s no need to politicize it.”

How damn funny is that?

Update:

Not surprisingly, the feckless Democratic governor of Ohio isn’t taking any of these illegalities terribly seriously.

“I don’t want to minimize what may have happened here,” Strickland told reporters today. “But worst-case scenario, there is no evidence of any systematic, wide-spread abuse of government resources.”

Strickland placed Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the state Department of Job and Family Services, on paid leave Friday after e-mails requested by The Dispatch showed that she possibly used a state computer and e-mail account for political fundraising. Strickland has asked Inspector General Thomas P. Charles to investigate.

Other members of Strickland’s administration did work for the Obama campaign, but when asked whether he’s checking into any other possible misuse of state resources, the governor replied, “I have no reason to believe that that would be necessary or called for.”

Got that? There are the rules for them, and then there  are the rules for everyone else.

Amazing who wins political office these days.

A City Council member from Jersey City was arrested over the weekend after patrons at a Northwest Washington nightclub complained that someone had urinated on them from the balcony, according to police and media reports.

A D.C. police spokesman said Steven Lipski was arrested about 9:50 p.m. and charged with simple assault. A police incident report, which did not name the suspect, gave his age as 44. Another police report listed Lipski as a resident of Jersey City. Public records for the Steven Lipski who sits on the Jersey City council list his age as 43 or 44.

Jennifer Morrill, a spokeswoman for Jersey City, said last night that she did not have all the details about what she termed a “private, personal matter.” It would be “premature to make any kind of comment,” she said.

Calls to the telephone number listed for Lipski in Jersey City were not returned yesterday. An e-mail also went unanswered. Irina Zaki, an aide to the Democratic councilman and educator, said she called him yesterday but received no answer.

Notice how this story shows up on page 3 of the B section of the WaPo. Had this been a Republican, it would be on the front page above the fold, baby.

Rahm Emanuel is keeping  up the charade.

A middle-class tax cut will be one of President-elect Obama’s first proposals after he takes the oath of office, incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.

In the first interview of the first appointee to the new administration, Emanuel told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” that Obama’s economic plan “at this juncture is based on giving 95 percent of working Americans a tax cut.”

“Over the years, the middle class has been squeezed consistently by rising costs on education, health care and energy, as well as a diminishing income,” Emanuel said. “You must have an economic program that focuses on them. … It was built on the fact that the middle had been hurt. And to have a strong recovery, and a sustained recovery over a period of time means that the middle class must the focus of the economic strategy.”
Emanuel’s chief message for the day: “We have a huge economic crisis here at home that is looming large. That is going to be the focus of his policies. … The business of what we have to do when we get sworn in is focusing on what the American people care about. Priority one is the economy.”

During the campaign, Obama promised a $1,000 “Making Work Pay” tax credit.

It’s nice to see that Obama  keeps on dissembling about this “middle class tax cut” even after getting elected. After all, consistency is an important attribute to have as president. But, there will be no middle class tax cut, and Obama never promised a middle class tax cut. What he promised was a refundable tax credit of $500-1000. That’s not a tax cut. A tax cut means you cut tax rates. A real tax cut stimulates the economy and produces jobs. What Obama proposes will do nothing other than increase the size of the budget deficit. It’s all smoke and mirrors, just like everything else about Obama.

By the way, there’s an even bigger lie in the article than the one about Obama cutting taxes for the middle class. And, here it is:

Emanuel did not directly answer a question about whether Obama would postpone plans to let Bush tax breaks expire, which would mean a tax increase for the highest earners.

Did you get that? Politico is trying to claim that when the Bush tax cuts expire, it will only result in a tax increase for the rich! But, the Bush  tax cuts were across the board, and when they expire pretty much everyone who pays taxes will see a very substantial tax increase.  Politico lost any semblance of credibility quite some time ago. Now they’re worth reading for entertainment value only.

These Democratic Party weasels have no shame at all, and there’s nothing they won’t do. But then, after Obama paid ACORN $840,000 to commit vote fraud all over the country, we pretty much knew that, right?

Coleman for Senate campaign manager Cullen Sheehan released the following statement today after it the perceived efforts of the Franken campaign and outside groups attempt improperly to influence canvassing process. The statement alludes to a “legal proceeding” of which I am not aware:

“Not content to allow the recount process to move forward as prescribed by law, the Franken Campaign and its supporters are attempting a campaign of undue influence. The increasing questions about unexplained and improbable shifts in vote counts, coupled with Franken Campaign antics over the past 24 hours, compelled us to seek legal action to protect the rights of Minnesota voters. We had an election. Senator Coleman won. And we now must have a legal and transparent process conducted in the light of day - and that is our goal and intent.

“Late last night, after another unexplained shift in votes occurred when the Secretary of State’s Office closed, new ballots have suddenly appeared from a heavily Democratic precinct. These ballots have been unsecure since the election, yet the Franken Campaign is demanding they be stuffed into the ballot box, attempting to change a vote count that was already finished. Minnesota election laws provide specific rules for reviewing and counting ballots. Today’s legal proceeding is an effort to ensure that a transparent and orderly process be in place. The Franken Campaign should be joining us in this action, not seeking to push the process outside the bounds of the law.”

As I wrote this morning, the election seems to be in the process of being stolen.

I’m damn sick and tired of people telling me that we in the GOP need to be civil, and that we should not get down in the gutter with the Democrats. We need to start breaking some heads, so to speak. Otherwise, this kind of shit is never going to stop.

Prepare to be dissapointed.

When half of mankind seems lifted by hope, nothing looks meaner than to disparage the dream. But what is this Obama mania? The world did not change for ever on Tuesday. No messiah has come among us. Miracles have not become possible. There is no new dawn. Calm down dear, it’s only a US presidential election.

Here’s my entry for Daniel Finkelstein’s Comment Central competition for an eight-word expression of hope for the President-elect of the United States. Eight words precisely. “I hope he will let us down gently.”

But oh, what a long way down: down from the crest of expectation on which Barack Obama now surfs, on to the rough shingle of daily politics. Would that the wave might subside smoothly into the gentle swell of history. Would that it were not destined to break, dashing dreams and spawning new cynicism.

But I fear it will. Writing from Australia, and reading the local and the British press reaction to this election, I am appalled by the unanimity.
Yesterday I tried googling the name Obama with the phrase “President of the world”. There were 552,000 entries. In hopes of astringency I tried the leader column of The Daily Telegraph. “He is not so much an American citizen as a citizen of the world,” I read. “America, welcome back into the world,” gushed The Guardian, speaking for the world.

I turned to the Australian media. A spokesman for the Aboriginal community explains that the President-elect will have a special place in his sympathies for Aborigines. While Gordon Brown hopes the President-elect will have a special place in his heart for a British Labour Government, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd (says the sobersided Australian Financial Review), believes special attention can be given to the US-Australian alliance “now Barack Obama has won”. Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Leader of the Opposition, says Mr Obama’s victory represented “a defining moment in history”.

“The election of Obama is when the old world ended and the new world began,” I read in the Australian Daily Telegraph. Kenyans look to Mr Obama for the President-elect’s special attention. Gays note that he specially mentioned us in his victory speech.

Look, let people be excited. Everyone needs to be fired up every once in a while. They’ll be time enough for bitter disappointment when the world learns what so many millions of us in the US already know. Barack Obama is just a far left-wing idealogue, and yet another  corrupt Chicago machine politician.  They’ll be no healing, hope or change in any meaningful way. It’s all been just smoke and mirrors from the get go.

Helen Jones-Kelly, the maxed out Barack Obama supporter who okayed the use of the state of Ohio’s computer system to did up dirt on Joe the Plumber, has been suspended from her job.

Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and former head of that department in Montgomery County, has been placed on paid administrative leave by Gov. Ted Strickland.

Strickland said on Friday, Nov. 7, that he took the action “due to the possibility, as yet unconfirmed, that a state computer or state e-mail account was used to assist in political fund raising.”

“I have asked Inspector General Tom Charles to include this matter in his current, ongoing investigation,” Strickland said in a press release.

Strickland said he has asked Jan Allen, his cabinet secretary, to serve as acting director of the agency.

Charles already was investigating reports that a department computer was used to gather personal information about “Joe the Plumber” — Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher of suburban Toledo — after Wurzelbacher emerged as a key figure in the presidential race in Ohio. The information included whether he owed child support, which he said he didn’t.

He criticized Democrat Barack Obama’s tax plan and endorsed Republican John McCain.

This is probably all just a charade, and she’ll skate.  Either that or Obama will tap her for a cabinet position in his new administration.

Even as Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was ongoing, a senior member from the Obama campaign states Barack Obama stayed in regular contact with unrepentent terrorist Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn.

The relationship between the Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, the founder and leader of the now defunct terrorist organization Weather Underground, is deeper and closer than currently understood, according to an individual who has had a senior role in the Obama candidacy that has included direct contact with the candidate.

The Weather Underground was responsible for a series of bombings during the 1970s that caused extensive property damage. Three of the Underground’s own members died when a bomb exploded accidentally in a New York town house in 1970. Among the dead was Ayers’ girl friend at the time, Diana Oughton.

The source has stated that Obama and Ayers have a direct personal relationship that extends back to the 1980s and that there are now close ties between both Michelle and Barack Obama and Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, also a former leader of the Weather Underground. Global Labor believes the source to be highly credible but has not been able to confirm independently the comments made by the source.

The source has said that either Obama himself or his wife Michelle communicate with Ayers or Dohrn on a regular basis, up to “several times a week,” including discussions about the “vetting” of potential advisors to the campaign as well as potential appointments to staff positions in the new administration should Obama win the presidential race. (emphasis mine)

The source continues to support the Obama candidacy but has expressed serious concern about the influence of what is known in the campaign as the “Ayers camp” on the candidate

This is really quite stunning. Not only has Obama consistently lied about Bill Ayers and him being friends, which isn’t terribly surprising since Obama has lied about many things during this campaign. But, this means that Bill Ayers is going to act as  an unofficial advisor to Barack Obama. Anyone who was delusional enough to believe that Obama was going to govern from the center is going to be disabused of that notion very quickly, I can assure you.

Do ya think Mr. Hope and Change should  have picked a Chief of Staff who sat on the board of one of the companies responsible for this horrendous financial crisis we’re now going through, especially at the time that company was committing accounting fraud to the tune of many billions of dollars? Wait, don’t answer that, it’s obviously a racist question.

President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot “red flags,” according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint (click here to read) but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) (click here to read) of having “failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention.”

We’re really off to a terrific start so far. I can hardly wait to see what happens next. (via JWF)

Make way for Obama’s Digital Brownshirts.

A powerful new lobbying propaganda force is coming to town: Barack Obama’s triumphant army of 3.1 million Internet-linked donors and volunteers.

In a mass e-mail thanking them, written moments before his Grant Park victory speech, Obama put them on notice. “We have a lot to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next,” he wrote.
Many are eager. “I’m going to be sitting at the phone, asking, ‘What do you want me to do next? I’m ready,’” said volunteer Courtney Hood, 37, a mother of three from Owings, Md.

How Obama will use his ardent laptop-armed cadres is unclear. So is the extent to which they’ll rally behind his priorities, press him for their own or both.

Joe Trippi, the Internet politics guru whose computer geeks made Howard Dean a contender in 2004 and who went on to design Obama’s socially networked campaign machine, offers a provocative and educated guess.

Trippi predicted that Obama would use his forces, first and foremost, to intimidate congressional foes of his agenda, rally his allies and forge “one of the most powerful presidencies in American history.”

Certainly, Obama reaches the White House with the biggest, best organized, fastest-acting grass-roots army in the history of presidential campaigning.

Moreover, because his Internet operation was miles ahead of Republican John McCain’s, Obama’s liberal-to-libertarian electronic activists are in a position to dominate the new political medium much as conservative Republicans dominate talk radio.

Sending David Axelrod’s astroturfers out to all the conservative blogs to try to shout down their bloggers and their commenters does not mean you  have an internet operation that’s “miles ahead”. You didn’t fool anybody, nor did you really sway many people to your side. You got dealt a winning hand, period. Don’t try to make too much of it.

So, be careful not to read too much into it. Unless you’re a Democrat of course.  Then try to demagogue it as much as possible and claim that it means the country has all of sudden made a huge jump to the left. Check out the chart below from Redstate.

See the image to the right (and click for the full version): It’s a complicated chart, but it has a lot to say. On it are illustrated the popular vote and electoral vote victory margins of every Presidential election 1900-2008, assuming Obama gets North Carolina and McCain gets Missouri. This also only counts Republicans and Democrats, and third parties are ignored.

Also on the chart are the mean Popular Vote and Electoral Vote margins since World War II, that is, counting the 1948-2008 elections. From that we can see one fact right away: Obama’s victory is below average. We can also look at the tiny bars representing the 2000 and 2004 elections to see that comparing with those races is simply not any kind of standard to use when judging an election.

I’ve already discussed the fact that voter turnout was actually lower in this 2008  election than it was in 2004. There was not at all a big upswing in the number of young voters as the media predicted. But, what was significantly different was that the proportion of those voters voting Republican went down. Here’s a graph from Andrew Gelman’s blog that shows what I’m talking about:

So, it looks like this is really where the election of 2008 was lost by the GOP.  Greg Mankiw looks at this graph, and reaches this conclusion regarding what the GOP can do to combat this problem, which he believes may be an ongoing situation:

It suggests that the major difference between the past two elections and this one was the youth vote. In this election, the young left the Republican party in droves.

Why? I am not enough of a political scientist to be sure, but recent conversations I have had with some Harvard undergrads have led me to a conjecture: It was largely noneconomic issues. These particular students told me they preferred the lower tax, more limited government, freer trade views of McCain, but they were voting for Obama on the basis of foreign policy and especially social issues like abortion. The choice of a social conservative like Palin as veep really turned them off McCain.

So what does the Republican Party need to do to get the youth vote back? If these Harvard students are typical (and perhaps they are not, as Harvard students are hardly a random sample), the party needs to scale back its social conservatism. Put simply, it needs to become a party for moderate and mainstream libertarians. The actual Libertarian Party is far too extreme in its views to attract these students. And it is too much of a strange fringe group. These students are, after all, part of the establishment. But a reformed Republican Party could, I think, win them back.

Can the Republican Party move in this direction without losing much of its base? I have no idea, but for the GOP, that seems to be the challenge ahead.

I’m sure there will be much written about what the GOP needs to do to remake their party over the next few years, but moving back towards small government fiscal conservatism seems like a good way to attract libertarian younger voters to the party. After all, there’s nothing even remotely libertarian about the Democrats and their big government, tax and spend policies. The question is going to be whether adopting a more libertarian platform on social issues will do more harm than good.

And, turnout was actually lower than in 2004. This from the analysis of the exit polling data.

Race (17,515 Respondents) White (74%) Obama: 43% McCain: 55% Black (13%) Obama: 95% McCain: 4% Hispanic/Latino (9%) Obama: 67% McCain: 31% Asian (2%) Obama: 62% McCain: 35% Other (3%) Obama: 66% McCain: 31%

In other words, this idea that there would be a huge upswing in the number of black voters because of how fabulous a candidate Barack Obama was turned out to be another myth, just like the idea that turnout would be massive in this election was a myth. In the end, turnout was probably lower than it was in 2004 because people weren’t particularly thrilled with the choices they had.  The media created this whole myth to make Obama appear to be this transformational, invincible candidate, and they’ve been found out.

There’s some seriously overblown rhetoric out there regarding Obama’s win last night.

“This is the fall of the Berlin Wall times ten,” Rama Yade, France’s black junior minister for human rights, told French radio. “America is rebecoming a New World.”

Really? Obama being elected president is ten times more powerful than the collapse of the Soviet Union  and all of eastern Europe being freed from Soviet tyranny? And what precisely does “America is rebecoming a New World” mean?

In Britain, The Sun newspaper borrowed from Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing in describing Obama’s election as “one giant leap for mankind.”

Uh, okay. I wonder how the world’s reaction would have differed had Obama been a black conservative rather than a black liberal. I guarantee it  would have been far more subdued than it is now.

Time to gird the ol’ loins, baby!

There is no time to lick wounds, point fingers, and wallow in post-election mud.

I’m getting a lot of moan-y, sad-face “What do we do now, Michelle?” e-mails.

What do we do now? We do what we’ve always done.

We stand up for our principles, as we always have — through Democrat administrations and Republican administrations, in bear markets or bull markets, in peacetime and wartime.

We stay positive and focused.

We keep the faith.

We do not apologize for our beliefs. We do not re-brand them, re-form them, or relinquish them. We defend them.

We pay respect to the office of the presidency. We count our blessings and recommit ourselves to our constitutional republic.

We gird our loins, to borrow a phrase from our Vice President-elect.

We lock and load our ideological ammunition.

We fight.

***

First assignment for fiscal conservatives in Washington:

1) Oppose the Democrats’ next stimulus boondoggle.
2) Oppose Obama’s windfall profits tax proposal.
3) Oppose new bailouts for states deep in debt.
4) Oppose new foreclosure prevention measures that will simply provide perverse incentives for borrowers to walk away and delay a needed market correction.
5) No more federal loan guarantees for corporations (especially in light of this.

It’s certainly been a more interesting election than we’ve seen in some time. On one hand, we’ve elected a mixed race president. And, while he’s not even close to being my choice of who I would’ve liked to be the first, overall I think it’s a positive thing.  On the other hand, we’ve elected a crypto-Marxist to the highest office in the land, which is certainly a very, very bad thing that we’ve going to suffer with for years to come.  Public financing for elections, I think, has just been dealt a death blow which I think is clearly a step in the wrong direction.

Public polls have  again been proven to be ridiculous, with Obama winning the popular vote by 2% rather than the 8-12% that was predicted. The turnout predictions also appear to wildly off base.  The number of PUMAs voting for McCain also looks to have been very wide of the mark, since sites like Hillbuzz were predicting something like 25-40% in PA would go against Obama.

It looks like the number of young voters coming out to vote was far lower than predicted as well.  It certainly appears that the media really sold us a complete cock and bull story about Obama winning a landslide election led by a massive surge of young and African American voters. Just keep this in mind. Obama spent a billion dollars on his campaign. He had the media in his pocket to the point that they steadfastly refused to report anything negative about the guy. But, when all is said and done, half the country voted against Obama. Will he take that into consideration and try to lead from the center? I highly doubt it.

Do not let media reports of an Obama landslide, or the exit polls that are going to start coming out this afternoon, deter you from voting. They’re going to try to trick you into not voting by leaking bogus poll numbers just like they did in 2004. It’s all one last desperate attempt by the legacy media to try to steal the election for Obama.  Don’t let the David Axelrod propaganda machine manipulate you into not doing your civic duty and heading to the polls.

Oh well. All those racist redneck states full of people clinging to their guns and their religion look the same anyway. So, Obama’s mistake is understandable. (via Ace)