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PRESIDENTIAL WATCH
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(caricatures by
Linda Eddy)
Friday, Oct. 10, 2008
GENERAL NEWS HEADLINES with excerpts
Obama secretly tried to sway Iraq gov't on Bush deal - In private conversations on troop presence, candidate pitched delay
Obama's
conversations with the Iraqi leaders, confirmed to The Washington
Times by his campaign aides, began just two weeks after he clinched
the Democratic presidential nomination in June and stirred controversy
over the appropriateness of a White House candidate's contacts with
foreign governments while the sitting president is conducting a war...
Some of the specifics of the conversations remain the subject of dispute. Iraqi leaders purported to The Times that Mr. Obama urged Baghdad to delay an agreement with Mr. Bush until next year when a new president will be in office - a charge the Democratic campaign denies....
FBI, others probe ACORN for voter fraud
Pennsylvania:
Bogus voter sign-up may draw felony charges
Violations of election laws generally are misdemeanor charges, but forging a signature on an official document is a violation of criminal law and could be a felony. In Pennsylvania, a second-degree felony forgery conviction could carry up to 10 years in prison.
Elections Division Manager Mark Wolosik said employees of his office found registration cards missing critical information or bearing signatures that did not match voters' signatures on file. Wolosik said he referred the cases to county police.
Some, but not all, of the questionable applications came from canvassers working for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, which lobbies for poor communities. ACORN is facing scrutiny in Pennsylvania and at least eight other states on accusations of filing fake voter registrations.
Maryellen Hayden, lead organizer for ACORN of Allegheny County, said eight of her chapter's workers were under investigation for turning in questionable registrations...
Houston has 4,000 dead people registered to vote
Texas Watchdog compared Harris County's voter registration roll with the Social Security death index and found more than 4,000 matches -- registered voters that, it appears, are already dead.
Some of them, like Henderson Hill's late wife Linda, voted postmortem.
Indianapolis has 105%
of its population registered
ACORN
voter registration fraud:
individual filled out registration cards
72 times
Missouri officials suspect fake voter registration
Obama & Ayers...
Krauthammer:
Obama's character remains highly suspect
...associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama.
...Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright's angry racism or Ayers's unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?
No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.
First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did.
...even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama's core beliefs. He doesn't share the Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers's views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.
Until now. Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.
Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.
McCain camp releases damning Ayers ad
"When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers.
When discovered, he lied."
"Obama's friendship with terrorist Ayers isn't the issue," the narrator continues. "The issue is Barack Obama's judgment and candor. When Obama just says, 'This is a guy who lives in the neighborhood,' Americans say, 'Where's the truth, Barack?'
"Barack Obama, too risky for America," the announcer concludes.
John McCain & Sarah Palin... today's headlines with excerpts
Palin to appear as herself on Saturday Night Live, Oct. 25th
SOCCER
moms and Joe Sixpacks, listen up. Get your beer, mooseburgers and
caribou dips ready.
Sarah Palin is doing "Saturday Night Live."
Not Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin doing "Saturday Night Live." But the Sarah Herself. She has already OK'd it.
She's booked. It's confirmed. Done deal.
Sketches are being sketched as we speak. She - eyeglasses, haircomb, designer jacket and trunkful of gosh-darns, golly-gees and gol-dangs - will be on "SNL" Saturday night, Oct. 25. Sarah's rehearsal time has already been penciled in for Friday the 24th.
And it's because she wants to do it.
Anger is crowd's overarching emotion at McCain rally
There were shouts of "Nobama" and "Socialist" at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd Thursday for a midday town hall gathering featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin.
"It is absolutely vital that you take it to Obama, that you hit him where it hits, there's a soft spot," said James T. Harris, a local radio talk show host, who urged the Republican nominee to use Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and others against him.
"We have the good Reverend Wright. We have [the Rev. Michael L.] Pfleger. We have all of these shady characters that have surrounded him," Harris bellowed. "We have corruption here in Wisconsin and voting across the nation. I am begging you, sir. I am begging you. Take it to him."
The crowd of thousands roared its approval...
McCain: link to ex-radical terrorist is honesty issue
At the town hall meeting at a youth sports center here, McCain said, "We don't care about an old washed-up terrorist and his wife, who still, at least on Sept. 11, 2001, said he still wanted to bomb more. That's not the point here. The point is, Sen. Obama said, Ayers is "just a guy in the neighborhood."
The crowd booed.
"We know that's not true," McCain said. "We need to know the full extent of the relationship because we need to know whether Sen. Obama is telling the truth to the American people or not."
Cindy McCain accuses Obama of endangering her son in Iraq
"The day that Sen Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body," she said. "I would suggest that Sen Obama change shoes with me for just one day and see what it means… to have a loved one serving in the armed forces and more importantly, serving in harm's way."
Barack Obama & Joe Biden... today's headlines with excerpts'
Farrakhan on Obama: 'The Messiah is absolutely speaking'
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, another powerful Chicago-based political figure associated with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and other long-time associates of Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama, is leaving no doubt about what he thinks of the leader in the campaign for the White House.
He says when Obama talks "the Messiah is absolutely speaking."
You can watch it for yourself on a newly posted YouTube video:
Fictitious donors found in Obama's finance records
Last December, someone using the name “Test Person,” from “Some Place, UT,” made a series of contributions, the largest being $764, to Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign totaling $2,410.07.
Someone identifying himself as “Jockim Alberton,” from 1581 Leroy Avenue in Wilmington, Del., began giving to Mr. Obama last November, contributing $10 and $25 at a time for a total of $445 through the end of February.
The only problem? There is no Leroy Avenue in Wilmington. And Jockim Alberton, who listed his employer and occupation as “Fdsa Fdsa,” does not show up in a search of public records.
An analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times this week found nearly 3,000 donations to Mr. Obama, the Democratic nominee, from more than a dozen people with apparently fictitious donor information...
Obama staffer attends meeting with Hamas ties
The Obama campaign said it was a mistake for an outreach coordinator to join a meeting last month attended by leaders of two controversial Muslim groups as it seeks votes from large Muslim populations in swing states.
Minha Husaini, newly named as head of the campaign's outreach coordinator to Muslims, attended a discussion session Sept. 15 with about 30 Muslim leaders and community members in suburban Washington, the Obama campaign confirmed. Participants included leaders of the Council of American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim American Society, which have been cited by the government in the past for ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
In August, the campaign's previous coordinator, Mazen Asbahi, resigned over a similar issue...
Obama buys 30-minute primetime ad slot
Obama had completed deals to show a half-hour program about his candidacy on CBS and NBC on Wednesday, Oct. 29, less than a week before Election Day. The campaign is also talking to ABC and Fox about similar deals, though the potential of a World Series Game 6 may make that impossible on Fox...
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