WingRight

Just briefly, when responding to a voter question at a town hall, the real Barack showed himself. From Investors Business Daily

But on a campaign stop in Toledo, he couldn’t assure self-employed 34-year-old plumber Joe Wurzelbacher to his face that he would get a tax cut. Poised to buy a $250,000-a-year firm, the working-class plumber of 15 years confronted Obama.

“Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” he asked.

Obama responded with the promise of a 50% tax credit for health care, but the senator conceded that Wurzelbacher’s income taxes would indeed rise.

“It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama told him. “I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you — that they’ve got a chance at success too.”

Wurzelbacher, who would shoulder all the responsibility and risk of such an investment, did not look impressed. Obama then let the cat out of the bag, saying:

“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Here’s Joe, a guy who wants to be a successful plumber in Toledo and Obama wants to spread some of his “wealth” around to other people who Obama has decided are more deserving of it than Joe, who worked for it.

The editorial says that Joe has been a plumber for 15 years. That’s 15 years of hard work, sometimes up to his knees in sewage, and now, after 15 years of 60-hour weeks, he’s in a position to make a step up and own his own business and Obama wants to tax the socks off of him because he’s “rich.”

If you want an example of putting a bullet through the head of the American dream under an Obama administration with a Pelosi house and a Reid senate, Joe the plumber in Toledo is exhibit A.

UPDATE - Here’s a video of the Obama comment:

Tags: Liberal "Solutions", Obama, Taxes by Publius
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Good post by Mark Impomeni on AOL News.

Excerpts:

Today’s line from the Obama campaign seems to acknowledge that there was a close working relationship of a nature greater than the campaign has thus far been willing to admit. . . .

But with one month to go before Election Day, and the stakes for Obama considerably higher, it is huge gamble to bet on voters being satisfied with only an outline sketch of the Obama-Ayers relationship. By its statement today, the Obama campaign has already admitted that its past statements on Ayers were a cover up. Questions will continue to dog the campaign until it finds a way to explain how Sen. Obama could not have known just who Ayers was, and what he had done, while he was working along side him for at least three years.

Tags: Ayers, Obama Problems by Publius
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Nice Deb has an excellent post on the Obama/Ayers Timeline that demonstrates contacts Obama and Ayers/Dohrn beginning in 1988-89 and continuing through 2002.

Tags: Ayers, Obama Problems by Publius
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Out of their own mouths.

Tags: Ayers, Liberal Fascism, Obama Problems by Publius
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Responding to an expanding blogosphere storm, the New York Times has decided that the Obama/Ayers connection needs to be massaged with Obama Has Met Ayers, but the Two Are Not Close.

Both Ayers and his wife, Bernadette Dohrn, refused to speak to the NYT despite numerous requests. The piece is most notable for what it doesn’t say, but first, some excerpts:

Twenty-six years later [after Ayers' terrorist violence], at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.

Who else was at the meeting? The NYT does not say that this was the first meeting between Obama and Ayers.

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”.

Even the NYT acknowledges that Obama “played down” his Ayers relationship. Another view of this is that Obama lied about the nature of his relationship.

[Read more →]

Tags: Ayers, Liberal Hypocrisy, Liberal Media, Obama Problems by Publius
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Excellent blog post by Hugh Hewitt on what McCain should do after the Palin debate win:

His simple, closing message ought to be that the world is threatened by terrorism, and the global economy is threatened by rising taxes, chains on productivity, pressure on trade, and corrupt, self-dealing political elites at home and abroad.

McCain needs to declare that he’s been around a long time, and he’s seen all the big mistakes made and all the costs paid, and that he isn’t going to stand for it now.

McCain should pledge to be John McCut from day one in the White House:

He’ll cut taxes on new businesses and construction to jump start a flat economy and invigorate employment;

He’ll cut federal spending to make sure we have the resources for those that need it and not those who have gotten fat off of subsidies;

He’ll cut the chains that government has put on productivity, allowing builders to build and energy companies to explore and producers to make;

He’ll cut every trade barrier he can find and commit to an export economy that will surge the growth in American production of the goods and services demanded around the globe;

He’ll cut the corrupt culture of self-dealing that allowed Freddie and Fannie to pump hundreds of billions of bad loans to over-their-head borrowers and into the economy and thereby infect our financial system to the point of collapse;

And finally, he’ll cut the MSM down to size, calling them on their ridiculous double standard that sought to impale Palin while protecting Obama from his past. McCain should demand a MSM that serves that common interest, not the interest of Beltway-Manhattan elites and which holds all elected officials, not just conservative ones, to the fire. McCain should particularly demand that big media look at Fannie and Freddie and who turned them into Frankensteins and who profited thereby.

Tags: Hugh Hewitt, McCain, Palin, Taxes by Publius
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I’m normally not a fan of O’Reilly, but I love this.

Tags: Credit Meltdown, Economy, Liberal "Solutions", Liberal Losers by Publius
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The smartest thing that John McCain could do is to fly to wherever Karl Rove is, get down on both knees and beg Rove to manage his campaign for the next month.

The last Republican presidential campaign that was this bad was run by Bob Dole, another aging war hero. In the late stages of Dole’s horrible 1996 campaign, Dennis Miller commented, “You know, this wouldn’t happen if Bob Dole was still alive.”

Like McCain, Dole was a long-standing senate incumbent who hadn’t had a serious opponent in decades. Like McCain, Dole ran his presidential campaign as someone who had never been an insider in a successful national campaign. Like McCain, Dole acted like candidates had acted twenty years earlier.

What would Rove understand?

1. The main-stream press is completely committed to the election of Obama. The good old days of fawning Straight Talk Express coverage are gone and they’re not coming back.
2. Given that the majority of voting Americans don’t trust the reliability of the MSM, openly treating the network broadcasters and major papers as the enemy and as hopelessly biased will be extremely effective. The old time adage about not picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel and paper by the roll no longer applies in a world where newspaper circulation is plunging, Rush Limbaugh’s audience is four times the size of Katie Couric’s and Drudge gets more viewers in a week than all the network news programs will get in a month.
3. Rather than trying to reach the independent voters with watered-down talking points that may or may not make it through the MSM, find the non-MSM communications channels that independent voters use and give them a straight McCainian message.
4. Ridicule Obama. Over and over. The Britney/Paris commercial hit a nerve. Do that kind of thing all the time. Pick up the best YouTube ideas and turn them into commercials. When Obama fanatics go over the top with things like the Hitler Youth songs celebrating Obama (sorry for no link, the Obama campaign took it down) and prayers that end “in the name of Obama, Amen,” highlight that weirdness and tie it to Obama’s arrogance and air-head celebrity style.
5. Start hitting Obama hard on his radical left-wing past and his deep ties to corrupt Chicago machine politics. Demonstrate that Wright and Ayers were not exceptions, but part of an overall pattern of close cooperation with people who hate America. Show Obama’s ties to ACORN, a lawless radical organization that has faced voter fraud charges in a dozen states. Pound home that Obama filed suit against Citibank to force it to make subprime loans that are exactly the same loans that caused the credit meltdown.
6. Get Sarah Palin out for lots of press interviews – with interviewers who are not dedicated to stabbing her in the back. Have her become the new best friend of Rush, Sean, Glenn, Hugh, Instapundit, Powerline, NRO, Mark Steyn, etc., etc.   Let her take shouted-out questions from reporters and tell her to answer the Jeopardy questions a la Couric and Gibson with, “What did Senator Obama say when you asked him that question?”  The MSM’s goal has been to make Sarah look bad.  For the rest of the campaign, Sarah’s job is to make the MSM look bad.

Senator McCain – Call Karl Rove and beg. Otherwise, like Bob Dole, you’ll be remembered more for your Viagra commercials than for any of your political accomplishments.

Tags: McCain, Palin by Publius
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Is Obama really the author of his memoirs?

WorldNetDailey has a fascinating commentary from Jack Cahill that explores the question of whether there is any real evidence that Obama had the literary talent to write his two books without substantial help.

He didn’t start off very well.

In 1981, Occidental’s literary magazine published two of Obama’s poems – “Pop” and “Underground.” These poems are only a little sillier than the average undergraduate’s, but they show not a glint of promise. From “Underground”:

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance …

Los Angeles media critic Kevin Roderick rightly described the exposure of Obama’s two published poems as a “semi-cruel exercise.”

In a similar spirit, the Independent of London headlined its article on Obama’s early poetry, “Pop goes myth of Obama the young prodigy.”

Somehow, Politico unearthed a single unsigned case comment from the Harvard Law Review that Obama reportedly wrote, although it is interesting that he forgot this piece until someone reminded him of it. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say, it’s pretty bad, even by law review standards. It’s clear that he didn’t win a write-in contest to become a law review member.

But then somehow, those few years later, this 33 year-old amateur with no paper trail beyond a hack legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes produced what Time magazine has called – with a straight face – “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

The public is asked to believe that Obama did this on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I don’t buy this canard for a minute.

[Read more →]

Tags: Obama by Publius
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McCain doesn’t understand what kind of a fight he is in with the MSM. This is not 1980 and we’re not looking at a gentle headwind from the liberal networks. They are in full-bore attack mode.

Powerline believes that

Ifill’s position is untenable. She will almost certainly be accused of (a) being unfair to Palin in order to sell her book, (b) being unfair to Biden in order to prevent accusation “a” or (c) both. Either the first of the second accusation will be quite plausible.

The unspoken assumption is that Ifil will be very carefull to look unbiased. What’s going to happen to her if she is biased? Is NPR going to fire her over a lot of criticisms by Rush, Glen and the conservative blogosphere? Is Random House going to cancel her book contract? I don’t think so.

For every conservative complaint, there will be a liberal defense - Republicans are trying to deflect attention from Palin’s poor showing, etc., etc. Advance sales of the book will go through the roof.

The left has constructed a political, social and economic ecosystem that rewards people who toe the party line. Within this ecosystem, there is no downside to screwing a conservative.

Additionally, Ifil lives in such a left-wing echo chamber, it will never occur to her that her reasonable questions and viewpoint will be anything but right down the middle of the political spectrum.

What should McCain have said? “This is an outrage! I demand that an immediate change of moderators be made or that, in the alternative, a second moderator who is not biased in favor of the Obama/Biden ticket be added to the debate. If this doesn’t happen, I will consider requesting that Gov. Palin not attend the debate. How can a fair debate when Ifil stands to financially benefit if Obama is elected?”

Under this strategy, Palin wouldn’t withdraw from the debate, but that won’t be certain until shortly before the debate begins. That would play havoc with Biden’s head and make it quite likely that Ifil would have to begin with a statement about her book and would have a very hard time appearing to be anything but hostile to Palin.

McCain isn’t bringing a knife to a gunfight, he’s bringing a frisbee.

UPDATE - Hot Air has some good comments on this.

Tags: Liberal Hypocrisy, Liberal Media by Publius
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