(1) There are still undecideds out there.

While the polls keep talking about them, I found this hard to believe until I actually talked to some real live examples. And these are people who may well vote... They just don't know for whom. McCain can still gain even more ground before November 4.

(2) There are some really well-informed folks, too.

Heck, they probably read this blog. Not as many of these as the undecideds, though -- probably because in this election, you absolutely CANNOT be well-informed without internet access, and following the thing via MSM will leave you in a confused haze. Maybe about 70% of Obama-destroying arguments won't even have reached the latter folks' ears, and we certainly don't have time to explain them all during GOTV.

(3) GOTV could use more bodies.

If you haven't volunteered to knock on doors or make phone calls, why not? Your local Victory Office can likely accomodate you on pretty much no notice at all. Call in and show up tomorrow after church, or just make calls through the McCain site's phone bank. And do it again next weekend.

Seriously, are you going to spend this election haplessly wringing your hands on the internet like a certain Beta Male Blogger? Don't be ridiculous. As John Connor says, the future has not been written.

Posted by: Open Blog at 07:39 PM | Comments (91)
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This is not the objective, chase-any-good-story journalism I thought I knew.

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (152)
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Weakly, weakly.

Unless I missed it, the National Journal article does not mention that the Address Verification System is standard and basic and needs to be deliberately crippled in order to permit this.

I see no pressing questions for Barack Obama, demanding to know what possible reason they might have to deliberately cripple the most basic form of credit card security.

I cannot stress enough: AVS is default. It is not an arcane option you can choose. It is the default. To turn it off requires deliberate, intentional action.

And Barack Obama cannot offer any plausible legitimate reason for doing so.

Why does Barack Obama has less security on his credit card donations than my local cheesesteak shop?

And the Records Have Been Purged: Jerry writes--

One thing they did get, though, is important: an Obama spokesperson confirming that they do not keep credit card numbers.

This confirms that with AVS also turned off, there is no way for the Obama campaign to know how many times someone has donated, and how much, even if a donor uses the same credit card each time.

That's of moderate importance, because I've seen comments on other sites claiming that this isn't a big deal, the Obama campaign will still know if someone goes over the limit because they have the card number. If the quotes in the NJ article are correct, they don't have the card number. All they have is a bunch of names and addresses that are made up and can change with each submission.

Biff: on media priorities:

What makes this lack of reporting all the more remarkable, is when one pauses to consider all of the other lame hit pieces that has occupied the headlines over the last few weeks, not the least of which was.......gulp......Palin wearing nice clothes.

Reporting on the 'scandal' of Palin wearing nice clothes,

ignoring the intentional systematization of donation fraud.

This'll be one for the history books.

Something like $63 million has poured into Obama's coffers from foreign sources -- the tip there is that the donations end in pennies, like $43.36, which indicates they've been converted from foreign currency. Hence the odd amount of the donation.

Until very recently, Barack Obama did not even require overseas donors to prove their citizenship (as McCain and Hillary have always done) via a passport number or some other measure.

He did this deliberately. He only began asking for passport numbers when our sleepy-headed press roused itself enough to write an article on his deliberate law-breaking.

Where the fuck are the quotes from Obama's camp?

Camp Obama almost certainly offered "no comment," a damning statement in this context.

Where is that quote?

Why is National Journal playing this as a problem with "the system" rather than a deliberate subversion of the system by The One?

Hillary Clinton and John McCain had no problem keeping AVS turned on. Why is it Obama and Obama alone deliberately turned off the basic, standard system for verifying that credit card donations are being made by people legally entitled to donate?

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (103)
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If ya care.

So far, games underway, (9) Georgia 21, (11) LSU 7. (1) Texas up 14-0 over (7) OSU. Michigan and Mich State tied at 7. (3) Penn St. and (10) Ohio St. tonight.

( TTech killed (19) Kansas. (4) OU killed K State.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:27 PM | Comments (94)
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Craig, aka John Galt aka Saddam Hussein, now reports that Obama's "rigorous screening" of credit card transactions is, what's the word, a lie.

It took a few days to confirm, but as of this morning all four charges have posted to my CC account (see attached). Remember, these were all separate donations made by:

John Galt

Saddam Hussein

Osama Bin Laden

Bill Ayers

And I have the screenshots to prove it. Also, I made another attempt this morning to make a $10 donation under the name Tony Rezko (See attached.) And it went thru again. So reports that this has been fixed are erroneous.

Further, last night on Sheppard SmithÂ’s 3pm-ET show this issue was brought up briefly and they cited the Obama campaign falsely claiming that this sort of thing happens at the McCain site and that they catch these errors later in the processing. Well, it took three days to process my donations and they all skated through their rigorous screening.

Note how little time it took citizens to prove this. It would take the media even less time to confirm it.

It's an easy story -- and a huge one.

But they're just not interested.

But you know -- they're hard news men. They'll go wherever a good story might take them.

Right? Right?

Screenshot... ...of competed donations by Osama bin Ladin, Bill Ayers, John Galt, and Saddam Hussein.

Bear in mind that anyone can use a false name -- the AVS doesn't check names. As its name -- Address Verification System -- suggests, it checks addresses and zip codes.

All of these phony donations were made with fake addresses. Obama's super-awesome security didn't pick up on it because they deliberately turned it off.

Again, this is no high-tech, limited use system. Virtually everyone uses it.

Obama doesn't. Because he wants foreigners to illegally donate, and he wants his cultists to go ten or twenty or fifty thousand dollars over the federal donation limits.

And he refuses to reveal all his sub-$200 donors, because he knows goddamned well what looking through those records would reveal.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (76)
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30% of ACORN's 1.3 million registrations are fraudulent.

And that's the figure they themselves admit to.

The actual number is likely far, far higher.

But it's just a few bad apples, they say.

30+% -- "a few."

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (44)
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To go along with my earlier piece and make it more clear, Mark Steyn says what I'm saying: Screw the Polls and tell those folks that think small government conservatism is dead to go take a hike.

It's not dead and the election is not lost. It's time to fight!

In the words of PublishersÂ’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. DonÂ’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and thereÂ’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it. [snip]

Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton JohnÂ’s post-Oscar bash and the other is a church social in Wasilla.[snip]

I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return”. It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term”, but something far more transformative.

Yes. Read the rest and listen to your Uncle John McCain: Stand up and Fight!

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:35 AM | Comments (78)
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Oh really?

She then goes on to ask him about Marxism -- a bit weakly, but I guess I have to give her props for asking.

Obama's campaign has canceled further interviews with the station.

Why did Barack Obama's campaign cancel a WFTV-Channel 9 interview with Jill Biden, wife of Sen. Joe Biden? The campaign cited "an unprofessional interview" WFTV's Barbara West did Thursday with Joe Biden. In a statement Friday, Adrianne Marsh, Florida spokeswoman for Obama's campaign, said the station, in talking with Sen. Biden, was "both combative and woefully uninformed about simple facts." Marsh said West's insistence that Obama was an organizer for ACORN was "100 percent false." "In a line of questioning that would make Rush Limbaugh proud, West even went as far as to quote Karl Marx, a Communist icon, in a disturbing attempt to associate Barack Obama with socialism," Marsh wrote. West said, "I think I asked him some pointed questions. . . . I don't think I was rude or inconsiderate to him."

Joe Biden Does a Sarah Palin Interview: Heh.

It's a good point. This is the first time anyone in the media has gone after either Obama or Biden.

Why?

Actually... The media asked difficult questions of The One exactly The Twice.

Once Chicago media asked him about Rezko, Barack Obama stopped the press conference short, protesting that they shouldn't be asking him about such minor corruption cases. The media got the message -- Obama has no good answers for any of this and if we keep asking, he'll look evasive and might even say something disastrous.

So that was the last time anyone asked him about Rezko.

Charile Gibson and George Stephanopolous asked him two questions about Ayers at a debate. Obama lied and obviously so. The media itself savaged Gibson and Stehphanolpolous for their impertinence.

The message was delivered: Anyone who asks these sort of questions makes Obama look bad, and thus must be insulted and hounded.

They got the message. No Ayers questions since. (And no, Schieffert's offering both candidates an opportunity to make their charges to the others' face doesn't count -- he still didn't ask Obama a question about Ayers.)

Since the media wouldn't ask any difficult questions, a plumber decided to.

And we know what happened there.

Another message was delivered, this time to a source who knows Ayers bragged of babysitting Obama's children: This is what happens to private citizens who stand in The Way of The One.

And the media was again complicit. Not only won't they ask questions of The One, they'll destroy anyone who does.

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (37)
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The Republican Party has several major issues and not particularly in this order.

1) No central message.

2) No Leadership

3) No Organization

4) No Discipline

5) No Party Loyalty

Harsh? Well, it's ten days out from the main election and the Cannibals are already tearing off chunks of the party and devouring it. They act like it is for the good of the party. Well, somebody ought to tell the Cannibals that it is damned hard to run a race when one of your legs has been chewed off and the cannibals are trying to rip your throat out. A little harsh reality seems to be in order here.

Why are so many republicans willing to go to the press and leak this or leak that about the politicians they serve? Why are certain commentators on conservative politics ready to devour and spit out parts or whole of the Republican Party and its candidates? Why is the Republican base so lackluster about their candidate or angry with these conservative "elitist" commentators?

See numbers 1 thru 4 leading to number 5. Don't blame reason 5 for numbers 1 thru 4. You only engender loyalty by having all of the others. So, here's a question for you? Who is leading the Republican party? Who is setting the message?
more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:54 AM | Comments (103)
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According to this article in the Times from October of 1977, reporting on a leaked FBI report.

Shocking, I know. A leaked FBI report through the NYT.

I purchased the article from the archives too, just in case, here's the .pdf

-Three years before militant members of the students for a Democratic Society split off to form the Weather Underground Organization in 1970, North Vietnamese and Cuban officials were influencing radical antiwar strategy through foreign meetings. Many of these meetings were held in Communist countries, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia and North Vietnam.

-The conduit for contact in the United States was a group of intelligence agents assigned to the staff of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations in New York. These agents arranged for American youths to be inculcated with revolutionary fervor and, occasionally, to be trained in practical weaponry by Cuban military officers through the so-called Venceremos Brigades.

-After the Weathermen went "underground" in 1970 and many of them were being sought by the F.B.I. on criminal charges, Cuban intelligence officers were in touch with them from both the New York mission and the Cuban Embassy in Canada.

-Cuban officials helped several Weather Underground adherents who feared arrest in the United States to travel to Prague, Czechoslovakia, and then to reenter the United Slates surreptitiously.

The report linked the growing militancy of certain members of the Students for a Democratic Society, which resulted in the so-called Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969; to North Vietnamese advice the year before to choose youngsters who would battle with the police.

The North Vietnamese, according to S.D.S. literature of the time, had suggested that the antiwar movement needed not just intellectual protesters but also physically rugged recruits.

So, which WeatherUndergrounders did they help?

In another incident, the report said, four Weathermen who had been in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades were sent back to the United States through Czechoslovakia rather than through Canada with other brigade members to lessen their chances of being arrested by the United States authorities. The four wanted to get back to the United States safely after the explosion of a house in Greenwich Village killed two members of the Weather group, Dianna Oughton and Ted Gold, and the Cubans "obliged" them by making the European travel arrangements, the report said.

Informant Larry Grathwohl, yeah, that informant, said he'd been given instructions from Bill Ayers on the code system for contact set up by the DGI.

"In February 1970, leading WUO member Bill Ayers told fellow underground WUO member Larry Grathwohl that if communication could not be made through these Canadian numbers, an individual should get in touch with the Cuban Embassy in Canada in order to establish contact with other members of the WUO," the report said.

"To do this an individual should use the code name 'Delgado' when referring to himself and the person with whom he desired to make contact," it said.

Was Ayers one of the 4 they brought back through Prague? I don't know, but I'd sure as hell like someone in the media to ask him.

If they actually gave a shit about Ayers, which of course, they don't.

Nobody seems to give a shit about Ayers except you and me, and I'm starting to wonder about you.

(kidding)

Obama's chosen association. And one to date he refuses to repudiate acknowledge except to tell us all that "bombing stuff" when he was eight years old was a really bad thing.

Bombing stuff. Yeah, that's all it was.

I am remiss in noting that this was tipped to me by someone who'd rather not be acknowledged. He did the diggin, not me.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 10:37 AM | Comments (48)
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