Smarting from ridicule about the way John Edwards' sexual mischief was covered up or ignored for months, the mainstream media have decided to...

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. . . avoid similar charges that they are protecting Barack Obama.

Hence the New York Times' unprecedented Page One treatment of Jerome Corsi's latest best-seller, "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality."

Obama sought out relationships with the socialist-radical Saul Alinsky, the unapologetic bomb-thrower Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground associate Bernardine Dohrn, the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis, left-wing Muslim-supporting politicians in Kenya, the corrupt political fixer Tony Rezko, and the black-liberation-theology Rev. Jeremiah Wright who preaches hate of America and accuses the United States of creating the AIDS virus to kill blacks.

Who would Obama appoint to fill the upcoming vacancies on the Supreme Court? Certainly not justices like John Roberts or Samuel Alito; Obama voted no on both of them and offensively called Justice Clarence Thomas the worst justice on the Supreme Court.

What is University of Illinois hiding?

November 2, 2007

No foolin’. The money bit starts at around 1:10. One of the core arguments against the war is that it’s destabilizing the region; the destabilization that would come with Shiite fundamentalists wielding an atomic bludgeon seems of less concern. Paul squares that circle neatly by declaring that the Middle East is none of our business. He has no moral or strategic interest, obviously, in partnering with Israel to check Islamism. Nor does he seem concerned with guaranteeing our energy interests. To do so would presumably hew too closely to the dreaded neocon “war for oil” bumper sticker, although how he’d plan to meet the demand for petroleum if apocalyptic war did break out isn’t addressed here.

Never mind that, though. What can he possibly mean by “[t]hey’re incapable of even attacking their neighbors … and they have no history of doing this”? Whatever else Paul may be, he’s not stupid. Why would he think Iran, which has advanced ballistic missile technology, would be incapable of attacking anyone? And why, given their fondness for using proxies in Lebanon and Iraq, does he think they’d shy away from handing a nuclear weapon to terrorists to smuggle into a western country? The second-most powerful man in Iran is under indictment in Argentina for his role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center. There’s a $2.65 billion judgmentsmacked Paul at the debate last month: he seems somehow unable to conceive that state governments and terrorist organizations might coordinate. Which, as I said at the time, is an odd position for a man who voted for the Afghanistan war to be in. standing against the Iranian government in this country for their role in the 1983 barracks bombing in Lebanon. This is what Giuliani was getting after when he

As for the rest of it, from the nonsense about Iran only reacting to our foreign policy to his ignorant insistence that occupation is the source of all grievance, let me know when he gets around to actually addressing what Al Qaeda’s said. He likes to wag his finger at Giuliani about ignoring the enemy’s grievances the better to advance the neocon agenda. Click that last link to see how Paul himself does on that count. Money quote from Gadahn’s tirade: “[L]et us be clear: A pullout from Iraq alone, in the absence of compliance with the remainder of our legitimate demands, will get you nowhere, and will not save you from our strikes.” Click the image to watch.

Pat Buchanan: “If Cold War II is coming, who started it, if not us?”

Whereupon he lurches into a climactic perfunctory sneer about getting Saakashvili a job at AEI and calls for Joe Biden to hold public hearings on whether Bush Knew. There’s no reason I can see why anti-NATO isolationists can’t also be pro-Georgia: Restricting the use of U.S. military force to our own “sphere” isn’t inconsistent with wanting to help fledgling former Soviet satellites protect their independence through trade, military training, foreign aid, and diplomacy. Buchanan seems to be saying otherwise, that not only should we get out of Putin’s way, we should actually informally (or formally?) recognize Russia’s dominion over those satellites. How else to read the creepy nostalgia about Yalta being a resort for Russian aristocracy or the suggestion that Putin, a guy known for bumping off journalists who cross him, reached out to the U.S. in good faith by nobly “shedding” his empire before the evil neocons slapped his hand away? (PB must be the only person left in the world who thinks Bush’s infamous assessment of Putin’s soul was correct.) To put it another way, just what does he mean by Russian “primacy” and how far exactly does its “sphere” extend? If we’re supposed to stand idly by while Moscow all but reabsorbs its neighbors, then never mind Cold War II — we’ll be right back to Cold War I. And that actually will be our fault.

What kind of isolationist apologizes for another country’s expansionism, anyway? Answer: The same kind that thinks Churchill was the chief warmonger of the early 1940s, I guess. Exit question: For people who complain so much about neocons dramatically overstating the threats from foreign powers, Birchers like Buchanan and Ron Paul sure aren’t above dramatically understating them, are they?

Limbaugh to McCain: A pro-choice VP guarantees defeat; Update: Lieberman “very much in the mix,” say McCain advisors; Update: McCain “got the message,” says RNC; Update: It’s Ridge, says (unreliable?) CNN source

Obama: Gee, a single-payer health-care system would be sweet

Can we breathe easier, knowing Obama doesn’t want to overthrow the American system of medicine?  Not really:

“People don’t have time to wait,” Obama said. “They need relief now. So my attitude is let’s build up the system we got, let’s make it more efficient, we may be over time—as we make the system more efficient and everybody’s covered—decide that there are other ways for us to provide care more effectively.”

“Other ways”, huh?  Perhaps Obama means that a better use of free-market principles for routine health care, using pre-tax HSAs and insurance for catastrophic coverage would force providers to compete as they do in non-covered elective medicine such as cosmetic surgery.  Maybe he means that reducing government mandates and reining in malpractice awards could assist in lowering the overall cost of medicine to insurers and consumers.

But I rather doubt it.

I’m not sure what success anyone can find from socialist policies that continues to encourage visions of government-run Utopias, but all of the evidence runs to the contrary.  Even the architect of Canada’s government monopoly on health care now advocates for private-sector providers.  The UK’s NHS has horror stories galore about lack of responsiveness and capacity for both medical and dental care.  In the US, one need only look at the VA to see how well a single-payer system would operate.

And yet, Barack Obama still thinks that Utopia can be realized through government-run societies.

Ever hear of Claude Castonguay?  Maybe not, but those who follow the health-care debate have certainly heard of his creation.  Castonguay fathered the single-payer system in Quebec that locked out private insurance, the one which advocates of nationalized health care in the US love to cite as a success story.  However, Castonguay has reached a far different conclusion about his creation

Invesco Field sell-out takes on a whole new meaning with Obama

None of this would be objectionable had Obama just told his followers that public financing was a joke and that candidates should be free to raise and spend as they like.  Instead, Obama gave the nation a heavy dose of sanctimony over the value of public financing and grassroots support while reneging on his promise to live within the system he supported just a few months earlier.  Now he doubles that hypocrisy with a massive sell-out to the monied interests he slammed at the time.

Patients ’should not expect NHS to save their life if it costs too much’

We take it for granted that a vote means a secret ballot, but it was not always that way. Moreover, it will not remain that way for workers who...

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The problem for labor unions is that workers in the private sector increasingly vote against being represented by unions. The proportion of workers in the private sector who are represented by unions has fallen below 10%.

Since unions are losing the game under the current rules, their obvious answer is to change the rules. Specifically, they want to do away with secret ballots when the government conducts elections to determine whether the workers in a particular company or industry want to be represented by a union.

With labor unions being major supporters of the Democratic Party — spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this year's election campaign — it is hardly surprising that congressional Democrats have lined up solidly behind legislation to let union organizers simply collect signed cards from a majority of workers, in order to be certified as the officially recognized union for those workers.

Of course, the union organizers will then know who did and who did not vote for them. And they may have long memories or short fuses, or both. Moreover, the workers themselves know that, so they may find it prudent to sign up for a union, whether they want one or not.

This legislation passed the House of Representatives last year but did not make it through the Senate. "I will make it the law of the land when I'm president of the United States," Barack Obama has said to the AFL-CIO.

Sen. Obama has also said many times that he is against "special interests." But like most politicians who say that, he means that he is against other politicians' special interests. His own special interests are never called special interests.

Neither are the environmental extremists who support the Democrats called special interests. But the green zealots who have for decades blocked the country from using oil within our own borders — more oil than in Saudi Arabia, by the way — are also among the special interests with a big voice in the Democratic Party.

It is the same story when it comes to the teachers' unions, the biggest special interest of all in the Democratic Party. They not only contribute money, they can contribute people who walk the precincts on election nights, rounding up the faithful to go vote.

Even the Congressional Black Caucus dares not vote for vouchers or any other form of school choice that the teachers' unions oppose. Better to let a whole generation of black children be trapped in failing schools that employ union teachers.

But special interests? Not at all.

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