Presidential election may be up for grabs

[CougarKing]

Someone else passed this to me but somehow I am wary of using this source.

http://www.thenewsvault.com/cgi/xtra.pl?go=12234638434

McCain Linked To Group In Iran-Contra Affair

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain's ties to the U.S. chapter of a group linked to 1980s Central American ultra-right-wing death squads are under new scrutiny after his campaign criticized Barack Obama for associating with a former 1960s-era radical.

McCain served on the advisory board to the U.S. Council for World Freedom, which aided rebels trying to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua.

That landed the group in the middle of the 1980s Iran-Contra affair that rocked President Ronald Reagan's presidency and put the group in legal trouble with the U.S. tax agency, which revoked the charitable organization's tax exemption.

The council created by retired Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub was the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America.

After setting up the U.S. council, Singlaub served as the international league's chairman.

McCain's tie to Singlaub's council is undergoing renewed scrutiny after his campaign criticized Obama for his link to William Ayers, a former radical who engaged in violent acts 40 years ago.

Over the weekend, Democratic operative Paul Begala said on ABC's "This Week'' that this "guilt by association'' tactic could backfire on the McCain campaign by renewing discussion of McCain's service on the board of the U.S. Council for World Freedom, "an ultraconservative right-wing group.''

In two interviews with The Associated Press in August and September, Singlaub said McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain launched his political career.

McCain was elected to the House in 1982.

Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member.

"McCain was a new guy on the block learning the ropes,'' Singlaub said.

"We had McCain on the board to make him feel like he wasn't left out. It looks good to have names on a letterhead who are well-known and appreciated.''

McCain has said he resigned from the council in 1984 and asked in 1986 to have his name removed from the group's letterhead.

"I didn't know whether (the group's activity) was legal or illegal, but I didn't think I wanted to be associated with them,'' McCain said in a 1986 newspaper interview.

Singlaub does not recall any McCain resignation in 1984 or May 1986. Nor does Joyce Downey, who oversaw the group's day-to-day activities.

"That's a surprise to me,'' Singlaub said.

"This is the first time I've ever heard that. There may have been someone in his office communicating with our office.''

"If he didn't want to be on the board that's OK. It wasn't as if he had been active participant and we were going to miss his help,'' Singlaub said.

"He certainly supported us.''

A news article and two documents tie McCain to the council in 1985, a year after he says he resigned.

The group's Internal Revenue Service filing in 1985, covering the previous year, lists McCain as a member of the council's advisory board.

In October 1985, a States News Service report placed McCain, Rep. Tom Loeffler, a Republican from Texas and an Arizona congressman at a Washington awards ceremony staged by the council.

On Tuesday, the McCain campaign addressed the resignation by saying the candidate disassociated himself from "one Arizona-based group when questions were raised about its activities.''

Taking an opportunity to attack the Obama-Biden ticket, the McCain campaign added that as a House member and later as a senator, McCain fought against communist influence in Central America while Sen. Joe Biden tried to cut off money for anti-communist forces in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

The renewed attention over McCain's association with Singlaub's group comes as his campaign steps up criticism of Obama's dealings with Ayers, now a college professor who in the 1960s co-founded the Weather Underground, a group blamed for several bombings during the Vietnam War era, and years later worked with Obama on the board of an education reform group in Chicago.

Ayers held a meet-the-candidate event at his home when Obama first ran for public office in the mid-1990s.

In McCain's case, he was a House member and a board member of Singlaub's council when, as a new congressman, he voted for military assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras, a CIA-organized guerrilla force.

In 1984, Congress cut off military assistance to the rebels.

Months before the cutoff, top Reagan administration officials ramped up a secret White House-directed supply network run by national security advisers Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter.

The operation's day-to-day activities were handled by National Security Council aide Oliver North, who relied on retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Secord to carry out the operation.

The goal was to keep the Contras operating until Congress could be persuaded to resume CIA funding.

Singlaub's private group became the public front for the secret White House activity.

"It was noted that they were trying to act as suppliers. It was pretty good cover for us,'' Secord, the field operations chief for the secret effort, said Tuesday in an interview.

The White House-directed network's covert arms shipments, financed in part by the Reagan administration's secret arms sales to Iran, exploded into the Iran-Contra affair in November 1986.

The scandal proved to be the undoing of Singlaub's council.

In 1987, the IRS withdrew tax-exempt status from Singlaub's group because of its activities on behalf of the Contras.

Peter Kornbluh, co-author of "The Iran-Contra Scandal: A Declassified History,'' said the Council on World Freedom was crucial to diverting public attention from the Reagan White House's fundraising for the Contras.

Singlaub and the council publicly urged private support for the Contras, providing what Singlaub later called "a lightning rod'' to explain how the rebels sustained themselves despite Congress' cutoff.

In October 1986, the secrecy of North's network unraveled after one of its planes was shot down over Nicaragua.

One American crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured by the Nicaraguan government.

At first, Reagan administration officials lied by saying that the plane had no connection to the U.S. government and was part of Singlaub's operation.

"I resented it that reporters thought it was my plane. I don't run a sloppy operation,'' Singlaub told The AP.

In an interview last month, Downey, the full-time employee of Singlaub's council, said she has a clear memory of McCain resigning in 1986, but not earlier.

"It was during the time when the U.S. Council had been wrongly accused of being owners of the Hasenfus plane downed in Nicaragua,'' said Downey.

"A couple of days after that, I was in Washington and called home to get messages from my mother. I returned that call and a staff person wanted to ask for the resignation of Congressman McCain.''

When Hasenfus was shot down, McCain was in the final month of his first campaign for the Senate seat he still holds.

McCain's office responded quickly. McCain said he had resigned from the council in 1984. Further, McCain said that in May 1986 he asked the group to remove his name from the letterhead. McCain's office produced two letters from 1984 and 1986 to back his account.

The dates on the resignation letters in 1984 and May 1986 coincided with McCain election campaigns and increasingly critical public scrutiny of the World Anti-Communist League, the umbrella group Singlaub chaired.

In 1983 and 1984 for example, columnist Jack Anderson linked the league's Latin American affiliate to death squad political assassinations.

The Latin American affiliate was kicked out of the league.

At the time, Singlaub told the columnist the Latin American affiliate had "knowingly promoted pro-Nazi groups'' and was "virulently anti-Semitic.''

"That was putting it mildly,'' Anderson wrote in a Sept. 11, 1984, column on alleged death squad murders, an article that appeared two months before the U.S. election day.

Two weeks after Anderson's column, a letter from McCain addressed to Singlaub asks that the congressman's name be taken off the board because he didn't have time for the council.

Singlaub told AP that "certainly by 1984,'' he had purged the World Anti-Communist League of extremists. Singlaub complains that American news media wrote that the league hadn't gotten rid of extremist elements and tried to tarnish the league's credibility, "making something evil out of fighting communism.''

 

[CougarKing]

It appears that the current US election has divided American Catholics over which values and issues they should consider first and as priorities, such as abortion vs. capital punishment and racism and immigration.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27023915/

NYT: Election divides Catholic Church
Liberals, conservatives skirmish over church’s teachings on war, racism
By David D. Kirkpatrick
The New York Times
updated 4:33 p.m. PT, Sat., Oct. 4, 2008
As the Roman Catholic Church observes its annual “respect life” Sunday in this heated presidential election season, the unusually pitched competition for Catholic voters is setting off a round of skirmishes over how to apply the church’s teachings not only on abortion but also on the war in Iraq, immigration and racism.

In a departure from previous elections, Democrats and liberal Catholic groups are waging a fight within the church, arguing that the Democratic Party better reflects the full spectrum of church teachings.

It is a contest for credibility among observant Catholics, with each faction describing itself as a defender of “life.” The two sides disagree over how to address the “intrinsic evil” of abortion.

The escalating efforts by more-liberal Catholics are provoking a vigorous backlash from some bishops and the right.

In Scranton, Pa., every Catholic attending Mass this weekend will hear a special homily about the election next month: Bishop Joseph Martino has ordered every priest in the diocese to read a letter warning that voting for a supporter of abortion rights amounts to endorsing “homicide.”

“Being ‘right’ on taxes, education, health care, immigration and the economy fails to make up for the error of disregarding the value of a human life,” the bishop wrote. “It is a tragic irony that ‘pro-choice’ candidates have come to support homicide — the gravest injustice a society can tolerate — in the name of ‘social justice.’ ”

In response, a coalition of liberal lay Catholics is pushing back, criticizing the bishop’s message for neglecting other aspects of “life” talked about in Catholic social teachings, like concern for the poor.

To underscore the point, a nun is collecting the signatures of prominent Catholic leaders there for a newspaper advertisement reminding those who may be wary of voting for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic nominee for president, that the church also considers racism a sin that threatens the dignity of life.

“Here in Scranton, racist attitudes often prevent us from seeing all of our fellow citizens and candidates for public office as God’s children,” says the petition, circulated by Sister Margaret P. Gannon, a professor at Marywood University.

Scranton, the focus of a disproportionate amount of attention because it was the childhood home of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, has become a flashpoint in the battle playing out nationwide in weekly homilies, pastoral letters and diocesan newspapers. Scranton is also one of several heavily Catholic, working-class cities in swing states — like Cincinnati; Cleveland; Detroit; Erie, Pa.; Pittsburgh; and St. Louis — where a new network of liberal groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United are trying to promote the church’s social justice teachings.


Catholics make up about a quarter of the electorate nationwide and about a third in many of the most heavily contested states in the Northeast and Midwest, an increasingly central focus of both presidential campaigns.

The campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona has dispatched high-profile surrogates like Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, to remind Catholic audiences of the Republican candidate’s opposition to abortion.

For Mr. Obama, who supports the right to abortion, his campaign has trained its grass-roots organizers in the details of recent policy statements of the Bishops Conference.

Conservatives argue that ending legal protections for abortion outweighs almost all other issues, while liberals contend that social programs can more effectively reduce the abortion rate than trying to overturn Supreme Court precedents. They cite a 2007 statement from the United States bishops explicitly condoning a vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights if the vote was cast for other “grave” reasons.

The subtleties can be slippery. The Cathedral of St. Peter in Wilmington, Del., where Mr. Biden lives, is promoting a video produced by the conservative Catholic group Fidelis that is intended to persuade Catholic voters to put opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage above all other issues.

“Many issues are at stake,” a caption reads as the video displays a fetus and choral music swells. “Some are more important than others.”


'Voter guide'
Brian Burch, president of Fidelis, said the group had created the video as “a voter guide for the 21st century.” Many Catholic churches across the country have put it on their Web sites, and Mr. Burch said some statewide advocacy groups had been distributing it to their members.

At the Cathedral of St. Peter, the Rev. Joseph Cocucci has displayed the video prominently on the church’s Web page, and at each Mass he is urging parishioners to view it. Father Cocucci noted that the video also features smaller visual references to Catholics carrying peace signs and marching for civil rights.

“The video does say life is the most important issue, but if you notice it isn’t only abortion,” he said.

In the final push to Election Day, the intrachurch election debate is increasingly spilling into public view.

Last week, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the head of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in Missouri had stormed out of a Mass because his priest had invoked Hitler’s name in condemning Democratic support for abortion rights. The Cincinnati Enquirer published a column commending several archbishops for instructing Catholics not to vote for supporters of abortion rights but lamenting that the archbishop there had not done the same.

In the aftermath of the 2004 election, many liberal Catholics complained that parishes had distributed millions of copies of a voter guide created by a group called Catholic Answers that highlighted five “nonnegotiable” issues: abortion, stem-cell research, human cloning, euthanasia and same-sex marriage.

In response, liberal groups like Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance quickly began preparing alternative guides emphasizing a broader spectrum of the church’s social justice teachings.

Then the Bishops Conference, perhaps to forestall a blizzard of competing pamphlets, all but banned third-party voter guides from parishes, requiring the explicit endorsement of the presiding bishop.

But some, including the bishop of La Crosse in Wisconsin, a swing state, have nevertheless chosen to authorize distribution of the “nonnegotiable” guides this year. The liberal groups are trying to distribute their material through direct mail and at meetings of lay Catholic groups.

Alexia Kelley, executive director of Catholics in Alliance, said her organization was spending more than $250,000 on radio, print and billboard advertisements in Scranton and other heavily Catholic areas. The advertisements emphasize what Ms. Kelley described as the broader spectrum of Catholic concerns about the “common good,” including health care, jobs and home foreclosures.

Douglas W. Kmiec, a Catholic legal scholar who was a legal counsel in the administrations of President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush, has been telling Catholic audiences in Pennsylvania and other swing states that Mr. Obama’s platform better fits Catholic social teaching, including reducing the abortion rate.

Mr. Kmiec, who recently published a book on the subject — “Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama” — was speaking in Scranton last week when Bishop Martino issued his letter rebutting those arguments.

Asked how his former Republican colleagues were responding to his Obama evangelism, Mr. Kmiec acknowledged some resistance. “Some remind me that George Washington gave orders for Benedict Arnold to be shot on sight,” he said.

 

[a_majoor]

A little humour:

 

[a_majoor]

Up for grabs in a way we should not like at all:

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-acorn-fraud-kansas-city-officials.html

MORE ACORN FRAUD! Kansas City Officials Find Hundreds of Bogus Registrations!

Like Barack Obama says... "The ACORN does not fall far from the tree."

Indeed.

Tonight Kansas City officials are reporting that ACORN officials have turned in possibly hundreds of bogus registrations in Missouri.
The AP reported:

    Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

    Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

    "I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

    The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.

Yesterday, state officials raided ACORN offices in Las Vegas.

This is the Far Left group that the Pelosi democrats tried to funnel millions of tax dollars to in the bailout package this month.

Barack Obama's legal career consisted of working for scandal-plagued ACORN. Just this year his campaign has donated over $800,000 to ACORN for their get out the vote efforts.

 

[OldSolduer]

Sarah is still lots hotter than Hillary.....or Liz May. Rona Ambrose is hot too.

 

[CougarKing]

Sarah is still lots hotter than Hillary.....or Liz May. Rona Ambrose is hot too.

I certainly hope a lot of US voters aren't using the superficial reason of "hotness" as a determining factor on how they vote.  :

 

[OldSolduer]

hell I would! LOL

 

[Edward Campbell]

I certainly hope a lot of US voters aren't using the superficial reason of "hotness" as a determining factor on how they vote.  :

Americans are exact carbon copies of Canadians when it comes to voting. Superficiality can always be counted upon to outscore reason in the politics of both countries.

 

[The Bread Guy]

This intrigued me, although I doubt how effective it'll be - a YouTube video promo for a series of videos on why Muslims in the US shouldn't elect "disbelievers to kill Muslims overseas?"  Subtle, eh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUmte1x8Krc&fmt=18

 

[TCBF]

This intrigued me, although I doubt how effective it'll be - a YouTube video promo for a series of videos on why Muslims in the US shouldn't elect "disbelievers to kill Muslims overseas?"  Subtle, eh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUmte1x8Krc&fmt=18

Tony, an election campaign is not the time for subtlety.

8)

 

[OldSolduer]

I think Sarah is the hottest woman in politics, not that she has a ton of competition. >

 

[CougarKing]

I think Sarah is the hottest woman in politics, not that she has a ton of competition. >

HA! What about Obama girl?!!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

Since we are talking "hotness" here, I don't think whether or not holding office matters in this context. heheehe.  ;D

 

[chanman]

I think Sarah is the hottest woman in politics, not that she has a ton of competition. >

Right off the bat, I think she's got serious competition in Yulia Tymoshenko

 

[OldSolduer]

Right off the bat, I think she's got serious competition in Yulia Tymoshenko

Yeah she's good looking too.

 

[CougarKing]

Interesting. This guy is a really BIG Conservative. And he just endorsed Obama.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/10/a-buckley-endorses-obama/

October 10, 2008
A Buckley endorses Obama
Posted: 07:08 PM ET

From CNN Ticker Producer Alexander Mooney


Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, is backing Obama.
(CNN) — No, hell has not frozen over, but a Buckley is backing a Democrat for president.

Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat.

“It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday.

Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the “real” and “unconventional” man he once admired.

"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?

"Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"

But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect.

"Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for," Buckley wrote.

 

[tomahawk6]

Chris Buckley isnt a conservative.His dad William F was.

 

[CougarKing]

Another example that shows that McCain is trying to reach across the aisle and more bipartisan, by not letting the extreme fringes of his party get the better of him. I believe that shows some true character on McCain's part compared to Barack Obama, who seems to be self-promoting on some events, though obviously not as egotistic as Jack Layton on his commercials. But then again every one of them are politicians trying to present themselves as how they would like be perceived by the public.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081011/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_angry_crowds

McCain booed after trying to calm anti-Obama crowd
By PHILIP ELLIOTT and BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writers
1 hour, 48 minutes ago


LAKEVILLE, Minn. - The anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is acting to tamp it down. McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama's character, he described the Democrat as a "decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight." Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.

"If you want a fight, we will fight," McCain said. "But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments." When people booed, he cut them off.

"I don't mean that has to reduce your ferocity," he said. "I just mean to say you have to be respectful."

Presidential candidates are accustomed to raucous rallies this close to Election Day and welcome the enthusiasm. But they are also traditionally monitors of sorts from the stage. Part of their job is to leaven proceedings if tempers run ragged and to rein in an out-of-bounds comment from the crowd.

Not so much this week, at GOP rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and other states.

When a visibly angry McCain supporter in Waukesha, Wis., on Thursday told the candidate "I'm really mad" because of "socialists taking over the country," McCain stoked the sentiment. "I think I got the message," he said. "The gentleman is right." He went on to talk about Democrats in control of Congress.

On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.

"I don't trust Obama," a woman said. "I have read about him. He's an Arab." ( :)

McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:

"No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with (him) on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about."

He had drawn boos with his comment: "I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."

The anti-Obama taunts and jeers are noticeably louder when McCain appears with Palin, a big draw for GOP social conservatives. She accused Obama this week of "palling around with terrorists" because of his past, loose association with a 1960s radical. If less directly, McCain, too, has sought to exploit Obama's Chicago neighborhood ties to William Ayers, while trying simultaneously to steer voters' attention to his plans for the financial crisis.

The Alaska governor did not campaign with McCain on Friday, and his rally in La Crosse, Wis., earlier Friday was much more subdued than those when the two campaigned together. Still, one woman shouted "traitor" when McCain told voters Obama would raise their taxes.

Volunteers worked up chants from the crowd of "U.S.A." and "John McCain, John McCain," in an apparent attempt to drown out boos and other displays of negative energy.

The Secret Service confirmed Friday that it had investigated an episode reported in The Washington Post in which someone in Palin's crowd in Clearwater, Fla., shouted "kill him," on Monday, meaning Obama. There was "no indication that there was anything directed at Obama," Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told AP. "We looked into it because we always operate in an atmosphere of an abundance of caution."

Palin, at a fundraiser in Ohio on Friday, told supporters "it's not negative and it's not mean-spirited" to scrutinize Obama's iffy associations.

But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.

"Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate," she said.

___

Beth Fouhy reported from New York. Associated Press writer Joe Milicia contributed to this story from Cleveland.

 

[a_majoor]

Free and unfettered debate is the keynote of American culture, and one of the three legs of their astounding success over the past 300 years. Any actions that threaten or suppress free speech can only work to their detriment:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=308354689539729

The Coming Counterrevolution To Hush The Alternative Media

By BRIAN C. ANDERSON | Posted Wednesday, October 08, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Conservative-friendly media better get ready. Should Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats control Congress, as now seems likely, they will launch a full-scale war to drive critics — especially on political talk radio — right out of legitimate public debate.

Signs of what the new environment will be like for the right are already evident:

• When the National Rifle Association recently released television and radio ads in Pennsylvania targeting Obama's history of anti-gun votes, the Obama campaign's general counsel fired off bullying letters to stations that ran the spots, implying that they may have violated public-interest obligations.

• When the 527 group, the American Issues Project, came out with a commercial linking Obama to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the campaign (unsuccessfully) complained to the Department of Justice that AIP had broken campaign finance laws, and managed to spook some stations away from the ad.

• When two different conservative writers looking into Obama's background appeared on Chicago's WGN-AM Radio, the campaign's "action wire" energized its activists to bombard the station with rage-filled phone calls and e-mails, making the program more difficult to conduct.

(The show, hosted by the eminently reasonable Milt Rosenberg, had on both occasions invited the Obama campaign to send a representative to respond; the campaign preferred to answer with digital brownshirts.)

These crude efforts are only a start.

A Democrat-controlled Washington will use sweeping new rules to shush conservative political speech. For starters, expect a real push to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

True, Obama says he isn't in favor of re-imposing this regulation, which, until Ronald Reagan's FCC junked it in the '80s, required broadcasters to give airtime to opposing viewpoints or face fines or even loss of license. But most top Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, are revved up about the idea, and it's hard to imagine Obama vetoing a new doctrine if Congress delivers him one.

Make no mistake: a new Fairness Doctrine would vaporize political talk radio, the one major medium dominated by the right. If a station ran a successful conservative program like, say, Mark Levin's, it would also have to run a left-leaning alternative, even if — as with Air America and all other liberal efforts in the medium to date — it can't find any listeners or sponsors.

Then there are all the lawyers you'd have to hire to fend off the government regulators. Too much hassle, many radio executives would conclude; better switch to entertainment coverage or some other anodyne format. In 1980, it's worth recalling, talk shows of any kind numbered fewer than 100 nationwide, not thousands like today.

And Obama does say he wants to tighten media ownership regulations and expand the public interest duties of broadcasters, including by imposing greater "local accountability" on them — that is, forcing stations to carry more local programming, even if the public isn't demanding it (which it isn't).

This measure — aimed at national syndicators like Salem Radio that make conservative shows available from coast to coast — is just a sneakier way of shrinking the listenership of hosts like William Bennett or Hugh Hewitt, or even getting them off the air altogether.

Obama, like congressional Democrats, also wants to regulate the Internet, the only other medium in which the right does well, via its influential bloggers.

The means here: something called "network neutrality." Neutrality, if enacted, would give government overseers at the FCC the power to ensure that Internet providers treated equally all the information bits surging across the Web's "pipes" — its cables, fiber optics, phone lines and wireless connections.

This measure makes zero economic sense. Broadband providers want to manage more actively — and thus profitably — those information bits. They'd like to offer, for instance, new superfast delivery for sites or users willing to pay more (not unlike how FedEx speeds delivery of packages for a fee), or other new services such as online video or telephony.

Network neutrality would render all that illegal. But why, then, should broadband investors keep building the Web infrastructure needed to keep pace with surging use? Where's their financial incentive?

Yet if that infrastructure isn't in place soon, the vast amount of data pouring online will begin to slow the Web to a crawl, many experts believe. Needless to say, neutrality also will be a gold mine to telecom lawyers, who'll have their hands full figuring out what constitutes "digital discrimination."

But the biggest potential danger of neutrality is that its concern for equal treatment of bits will extend to sites' content, creating a kind of Fairness Doctrine for the Web, as FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has warned — and as Obama adviser and law professor Cass Sunstein once called for.

Not coincidentally, hampering the alternative media with new regulations would leave the liberal mainstream press, which still enjoys full First Amendment protections, comparatively empowered.

Given how the "MSM" has covered this presidential race — fawning over Obama and pummeling John McCain and especially his charismatic running mate Sarah Palin at every opportunity — it's easy to see why many liberals may be hoping for a media restoration.

Anderson is editor of City Journal and co-author, with Adam Thierer, of "A Manifesto for Media Freedom," just out from Encounter.

 

[tomahawk6]

To be able to shut down the alternative media would require the government to ignore the 1st Amendment.Frankly I think its too large and fluid for an Obama administartion to crush. That doesnt mean they wouldnt try. It might also depend how many new seats the dem's pick up so as to increase their majority.

By the way this video shows Obama talking to a plumber about his tax plan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNuqV7N_bj0&eurl

 

[CougarKing]

BTW, just a reminder: the last US Presidential Debate is tonight at about 6 PM Pacific time, 9 PM, ET on both CNN and various North American networks.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/15/presidential.debate/index.html

McCain must clarify economic plan in debate, analysts say
Story Highlights
NEW: McCain must present economic vision to win over voters, analysts say

NEW: New poll suggests McCain attacks on Obama may be backfiring

McCain says of debate: The Ayers-Obama tie "will come up this time"

   
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- GOP Sen. John McCain must clearly differentiate his plan to fix the ailing economy from that of his rival Sen. Barack Obama at Wednesday night's presidential debate if he is to shake up the race, political analysts said.

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain sparred about domestic policy during their second presidential debate.

"I think what he has to do is talk about the issues. ... He's got to talk about his economic plan," CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger said. "Yes, he's got to convince voters that he's got the judgment to be president, but he's also got to convince voters to like him."

The third and final debate, taking place at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, at 9 p.m. ET, may be the last time the Republican presidential candidate may be able turn the race to his favor before Election Day, now less than three weeks away.

The 90-minute face-off, which will air on CNN and CNN.com, will undoubtedly focus on the economic crisis plaguing the country.

CNN political editor Mark Preston said the debate will likely be McCain's "last chance to reach tens of millions of people with his vision for America."

"He needs a game-changer," Preston said.

As the nation has been going through a financial crisis over the last few weeks, McCain has slipped in the polls behind Obama, the Democratic nominee. 

A CNN Poll of Polls calculated Wednesday has Obama leading McCain 50 percent to 42 percent. Obama is also leading McCain in battleground states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.

As Obama has opened up his lead, the McCain campaign has responded by trying to raise doubts about Obama, particularly by tying Obama to William Ayers, a former 1960s radical who belonged to the Weather Underground, a group that bombed federal buildings to protest the Vietnam War.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released Tuesday night suggests that the McCain campaign's negative attack strategy may be backfiring on the Republican presidential candidate.

In the poll, 60 percent of the voters surveyed believed that McCain had spent more time attacking his rival than explaining what he would do as president. In contrast, nearly two-thirds of the voters surveyed, 63 percent, felt that Obama has spent more time explaining his policies than attacking McCain.  CNN's Ed Henry previews the last debate »

Ayers has been working for educational reform in Chicago. Obama's senior adviser Anita Dunn says: "What they are arguing is that somehow the fact that these two people, who both served as educational reformers in Chicago, both who did have their paths cross professionally as well as neighbors occasionally, that somehow this association is a problem because of Bill Ayers' past and things that happened in the 1960s when Barack Obama was 7 years old."

A CNN review of project records found nothing to suggest anything inappropriate in the volunteer projects in which the two men were involved.

On Tuesday, McCain outlined a detailed economic plan, which included tax-cutting proposals and other measures.

CNN contributor Roland Martin suggested that McCain would be better served if he continued to focus on his economic agenda during the debate rather than bring up Ayers.

"People are caring about pocketbook issues, and you can throw all kinds of extraneous stuff out," Martin said. "Bottom line... if McCain sticks to the economy and says how [he] can be a leader on these issues, he scores more points."

Alex Castellanos, a Republican consultant, agreed that McCain should focus on dollars-and-cents issues and make the differences between the two candidates' economic policies clear in the voters' minds.

"I think Sen. McCain... will say not that you don't know Barack Obama but you do," Castellanos said. "He's going to tax. He's going to spend. What happens if Democrats in Washington and a Democratic president get together and spend and tax without restraint, with no one to stop them -- no adult supervision?

"Make the case that's relevant to voters," Castellanos added. "Talk about risk that way but don't talk about risk... 20 years ago."

But Kevin Madden, the former spokesman for former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said McCain should not stop trying to attack Obama, arguing it would be right to raise doubt about Obama's credibility during Wednesday's debate.

"Ultimately, these debates are about moments," Madden said, "and John McCain needs to find a moment when he can crystallize the differences between him and Barack Obama on these attributes: that he's the credible leader, he's the person with experience, that he's the candidate with judgment, and Barack Obama is not."

And McCain said he'll probably bring up the Obama-Ayers connection in the Hofstra debate.

"I was astonished to hear him say that he was surprised I 'didn't have the guts' to do that, because the fact is, the question didn't come up in that fashion," McCain said of the last debate. "I think he's probably ensured it will come up this time."

As the clock ticks down to the debate, both candidates are in full preparation mode.

Obama, according to spokeswoman Linda Douglass, is preparing for the debate at a resort in Toledo, Ohio, and staying in touch with his team of economic advisers.

Advisers say that as the debate nears, Obama gets a sense of calm, turns off his cell phone three hours ahead of time and just focuses.

McCain, according to his campaign, will make final debate preparations on Wednesday in New York