Clinton fund-raiser backs McCain over Obama

A top Hillary Clinton fund-raiser threw her support behind Republican candidate John McCain on Wednesday, saying he would lead the country in a centrist fashion and accusing the Democrats of becoming too extreme. Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who splits her time between living in London and New York, said she believed that the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, and other prominent Democratic officials such as the head of the Democratic National Committee Howard Dean, would take the party "too far to the left".

Mrs Rothschild, who is a member of the DNC's Democrats Abroad organisation, praised Senator McCain for working with Democrats to pass legislation and for standing up to President George Bush on the Iraq war strategy. She also disputed Senator Obama's argument that a McCain administration would be an extension of Mr Bush's presidency. Democrats cite Senator McCain's own account of having voted in support of Mr Bush's policies 90 per cent of the time. She said the Arizona senator had broken with Mr Bush to support funding for stem cell research and to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

She said she was also excited by the prospect of a woman being elected to the vice-presidency, even though she and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin disagree on issues. The Alaska Governor opposes abortion except in the case of a threat to the mother's life. Mrs Rothschild said she supported abortion rights.

She was one of Senator Clinton's top fund-raisers, bringing in more than $US100,000 ($126,000) for her presidential campaign. She built a multimillion-dollar telecommunications company before marrying international banker Sir Evelyn de Rothschild.

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Video of Fannie Mae CEO in 2005 Explaining the "FAMILY" Connection with Dems & Obama

In 2005-- Senator John McCain partnered with three other Senate Republicans to reform the government's involvement in lending, after an attempt by the Bush administration died in Congress two years earlier. Democrats blocked the reform.

In 2005-- Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus met with Fannie Mae for a "family" event. In 2005 Democrats also blocked reform of Fannie Mae:



This was before Fannie Mae started filling the pockets of Barack Obama with political donations. The junior Illinois senator collected more money from Fannie Mae than any other Washington politician except Senator Dodd in the last decade. Obama was able to accomplish this feat in just 3 years. This video shows Fannie Mae CEO talking to members of the Congressional Black Caucus:

The Democrats have been taking PAYOFFS from Fannie and Freddie and have looked the other way FOR DECADES! They've blocked reform.

Now there's NEW VIDEO of the CEO of Fannie Mae in 2005 explaining the "FAMILY" connection with Democrats and specifically Barack Obama and the Congressional Black Caucus. It looks like Michelle Obama was at the event, too. This was before Barack Obama started collecting tens of thousands from the failed lender.

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Jews deserting Obama

The Siena poll, one of the two key polls of New York state voters, has come out with its monthly snapshot of the presidential race in the Empire State. And it's stunning. It is remarkable, though not eye-opening, that John McCain is now only 5 points behind Barack Obama, 46-41 - not shocking because polls have narrowed to similar margins in New Jersey. (It should be noted, however, that according to a Rasmussen poll released yesterday, Obama is leading in New York by 55-42.)

No, the shocking detail has to do with a wild, 35-point swing toward McCain among Jewish voters. Obama led among them by a margin of 50-37 in August. This month, McCain is actually leading Obama by a margin of 54 percent to 32 percent.

Siena polled 626 likely voters this month. Of those, according to Steve Greenberg, the spokesman for the Siena poll, 77 were Jews, or 12 percent of the sample. That is Siena's best guess of the size of the Jewish vote in New York state in November. With a sample size that small, the margin of error for the Jewish voter sample is plus-or-minus 11 points.

That means the poll could be off by as many as 11 points in either direction - i.e., McCain could be leading by as little as 11 points or by as many as 33.

The only difference between the September poll and the August poll as a matter of methodology is that in September, Siena polled likely voters, whereas in August it only polled registered voters.

The poll could, of course, be an outlier. But if it even begins to approximate the truth, it is huge news. No Republican has scored more than 39 percent of the Jewish vote in modern times, and that was Ronald Reagan in 1980, following a series of missteps by the Carter administration. These sorts of numbers for McCain have implications in two other states particularly - Florida and Pennsylvania.

In Florida, the implications are obvious. Obama's own Jewish organizers in Florida are telling the campaign they are finding profound resistance to him, particularly in South Florida. The polling overall there seems to be moving inexorably in McCain's direction, which is necessary for him; it is nearly impossible to see how he can win the election if he loses Florida.

But what about Pennsylvania? That is a state it appears Obama must win. There are, it is estimated, more than 200,000 Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, a state John Kerry won by 140,000 votes. If we assume Pennsylvania's 200,000 voting Jews voted in the same way as Jews nationwide in 2004 and went 76-24 for Kerry, we can attribute 150,000 Jewish votes to Kerry, his entire margin of victory plus seven percent. Now imagine if that number had been closer to 50-50. Kerry would have received 100,000 Jewish votes rather than 150,000. Bush would have received 100,000 Jewish votes rather than 50,000. Kerry's margin of victory would then have shrunk to 40,000 votes.

It appears Obama may have a tougher time in Pennsylvania than Kerry did because of his difficulty attracting the ethnic white vote in the western part of the state. If there is a Jewish swing away from him as well, he really could lose there. And if he loses there and loses Ohio, he is sunk. Ohio has approximately 80,000 Jewish voters, so a swing away from Obama to a 50-50 race would cost him 25,000 votes Kerry presumably received in 2004 - and in a state that Bush won by 121,000 votes.

We'll need more data from two other states with a significant Jewish population to allow for a measurable sample size in a poll - Florida and California - and a polling firm willing to break out the Jewish vote as Siena has, to see whether this is just statistical smoke or whether Obama has a brushfire he needs to put out somehow before it consumes him.

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Obama: Lucifer is my homeboy

By Ann Coulter

It's another election season, so that means it's time for Democrats to start uttering wild malapropisms about the Bible to pretend they believe in God! In 2000, we had Al Gore inverting a Christian parable into something nearly satanic. Defending his nutty ideas about the Earth during one of the debates, Gore said: "In my faith tradition, it's written in the book of Matthew, where your heart is, there is your treasure also." And that, he said, is why we should treasure the environment.

First of all, people who say "faith tradition" instead of "religion" are always phony-baloney, "Christmas and Easter"-type believers. Second, Jesus was making almost the exact opposite point, saying: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth," where there are moths, rust and thieves, but in heaven, because, Jesus said, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." I guess that's the kind of mix-up that can happen when your theological adviser is Naomi Wolf.

Then in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate and future Trivial Pursuit answer Howard Dean told an interviewer that his favorite part of the New Testament was the book of Job. The reporter should have asked him if that was his favorite book in all three testaments. And now in 2008, we have Democrats attacking Sarah Palin for being a Christian, while comparing Obama to Jesus Christ (and not in the sarcastic way the rest of us do).

Liberals have indignantly claimed that Palin thinks the Founding Fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which is Olbmermannic in the sense that a) if it were true, it's trivial, and b) it's not true. Their claim is based on a questionnaire Palin filled out when she was running for governor of Alaska in 2006, which asked the candidates if they were "offended by the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance." Palin answered: "Not on your life. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for me, and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance." As anyone can see, Palin was not suggesting that the Founding Fathers "wrote" the Pledge of Allegiance: She said the Founding Fathers believed this was a country "under God." Which, um, it is.

For the benefit of MSNBC viewers who aren't watching it as a joke, the whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to lay out the Founders' breathtaking new argument that rights came not from the king, but from God or, as the Declaration said, "Nature's God," the "Creator." That summer, in 1776, Gen. George Washington - a charter member of the Founding Fathers - rallied his troops, saying: "The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves. ... The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of the army." So Washington not only used the phrase "under God," but gave us one of the earliest known references to the rights of the "unborn." That's right! George Washington was a "pro-life extremist," just like Sarah Palin. There is no disputing that a nation "under God" was "good enough" for the Founding Fathers, exactly as Palin said.

Meanwhile, on the House floor last week, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee compared Palin to Pontius Pilate - and Obama to Jesus. Cohen said: "Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor." Yes, who can forget the biblical account of how Jesus got the homeless Samaritan to register as a Democrat in exchange for a carton of smokes!

Rep. Cohen would be well-advised to stay away from New Testament references. As anyone familiar with the New Testament can confirm for him, there are no parables about Jesus passing out cigarettes for votes, lobbying the Romans for less restrictive workfare rules or filing for grants under the Community Redevelopment Act. "No time for soul-saving now! First, we lobby Fannie Mae to ease off those lending standards and demand a windfall profits tax on the money-changers in the temple".

David Freddoso's magnificent new book, "The Case Against Barack Obama," describes the forefather to "community organizers" like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - the famed Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is sort of the George Washington of "community organizers." If there were an America-hater's Mount Rushmore, Saul Alinsky would be on it. He tried to hire Hillary to work for him right out of Wellesley. A generation later, those who had trained with Alinsky did hire Obama as a community organizer.

In Freddoso's book, he quotes from the dedication in the first edition of Alinsky's seminal book, "Rules for Radicals," where Alinsky wrote: "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: From all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer." I suppose it could have been worse. He could have dedicated his book to George Soros.

Even liberals eventually figured out that they shouldn't be praising Satan in public, so the Lucifer-as-inspiration paragraph was cut from later editions of Alinsky's book. (But on the bright side, MSNBC adopted as its motto: "Who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins - or which is which.")

That's exactly what happens to most Democratic ideas - as soon as they are said out loud, normal people react with revulsion, so Democrats learn to pretend they never said them: "I was NOT comparing Palin to a pig! I did not play the race card! I did not say I would meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions!"

Sarah Palin might be just the lucky break the Democrats need. As a staunch pro-lifer, Palin could give Democrats an excuse to steer away from topics they know nothing about, like the Bible, and onto a subject they know chapter and verse, like abortion.

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Obama Undermines Own Country, Media Ignores It; Why? They Want What He Wants

Once again, the mainstream media's behavior is being called into question - and once again, the reasons for it are obvious. It is now becoming abundantly clear that Barack Obama, in a meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, tried to undermine his own country's negotiations with Iraq during his July visit to Baghdad. Even the Obama campaign can't deny it because there were multiple witnesses to the exchange.

So once again, conservatives begin raising the question: Why is the mainstream media ignoring this story? They're treating it like they treated the John Edwards affair story, which they ignored until they no longer could. But this is much more serious. The Democratic nominee for president of the United States attempted to scuttle a crucial status-of-forces agreement between the U.S. and the government of Iraq. He blatantly urged the Iraqis to stop negotiating with the Bush Administration and wait until the next president - presumably him, at least as far as he's concerned - takes office.

While the media desperately seeks a relevant angle on the so-called "Troopergate" non-story out of Alaska, or perhaps investigates who paid for Sarah Palin's tanning bed, a U.S. senator who has not been elected president attempts to undermine legitimate negotiations between the man who has and the government of the nation we would like to stop occupying as soon as possible. And he does not even deny doing so, not because he wouldn't like to, but because he can't.

Why is the mainstream media ignoring the story? Well, first and foremost, because they want Obama to win the election. But it goes deeper than that. They're ignoring the story because they don't see anything wrong with what Obama did.

If you're a conservative and you're sitting there thinking Obama has no right to undermine our current president when dealing with a foreign government in a time of war, I agree with you, but they don't. The quaint notion that we support our president as commander in chief, and that he and he alone has the right to make foreign policy, carries no weight with the media. They look at Bush's poor approval ratings. They look at the unpopularity of the war. They look at the fact that Bush has only four months remaining in office.

And they ask, "Well, why should Bush get to negotiate anything? He's leaving soon, we don't like him and neither does anyone else. So what's the problem?" The problem, of course, is that Bush is the president, and that undermining him puts both the war effort and the troops at risk - not to mention the potential long-term stability of Iraq. There is also the matter of respecting the office of the president and the electoral process that put Bush in that office. The press doesn't care about any of that. They only care that they're tired of Bush and want him gone.

The other reason the press is giving Obama a pass on this is that they agree with what he was trying to do. Undermine Bush and the war effort? They've been trying to do that for years. Trumpeting bad news while ignoring the good? Screaming headlines about roadside bombs and troop-death "milestones" while ignoring yet another province we get under control? They've been at it since before the 2004 election. Any reporter who was in that room with Obama probably would have asked Zebari much the same question: "Why are you even talking to Bush? He sucks and we hate him!"

Obama's actions, while probably not treasonous, are beyond reprehensible in a time of war. The McCain campaign should take Obama to task in the most severe manner possible, but they will have to do it through ads and other forms of persuasion. They will have to take it upon themselves to explain to the voters why Obama's actions were wrong - and why, even if you don't like President Bush, you should be horrified at the idea of a U.S. senator undermining his dealings with a foreign government in a time of war.

The mainstream media will continue to ignore this, unless the pressure and the groundswell of public sentiment becomes so great that they can no longer do so. They think Obama is a hero for trying to undermine Bush. And they will continue to cover for him, unless and until they become afraid that protecting him will bring them down as well.

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Dems play footloose with immigration facts

By Ruben Navarrette Jr. Ruben is no conservative but is not shy of criticizing Leftist hysteria. The vast misrepresentation of the pro-immigration McCain as another anti-immigration Tancredo is just too much for him in the excellent article below.

As they recall the failure of immigration reform in Congress, Democrats want to come off as the good guys. This means burying the fact that their patrons in organized labor instructed them to kill any compromise that included guest workers -- a concept AFL-CIO President John Sweeney termed "a bad idea (that) harms all workers." And it means trying to refute a new Spanish-language television ad from the McCain-Palin campaign that blames Barack Obama and other Senate Democrats for undermining immigration reform in 2007 with procedural delays and "poison pill" amendments intended to make the legislation unpalatable to Republicans.

Translated, the ad says: "Obama and his congressional allies say they are on the side of immigrants. But are they? The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail. The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies: Ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

That is exactly what happened. It was smart but cynical politics. Led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrats were able to please the unions and deny a Republican president a huge legislative victory, all the while making it look as if the opposing party was to blame for the debacle.

Luckily, some members of the media kept their eye on the ball and put the blame where it belonged: on Reid and the Democrats. The Washington Post's David Broder, in a column published in June 2007, blasted Reid for going "out of his way to rewrite (the immigration bill) to meet the demands of organized labor."

Now, in response to the McCain-Palin ad, Democrats are practicing revisionist history. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey said in a statement released by the Obama campaign: "To say that Barack Obama and Senate Democrats blocked the bill that Republicans filibustered is hypocritical and not true. John McCain has lost his credibility when it comes to the immigration issue ... (He) cannot attack Democrats on immigration in Spanish while pandering to the extreme right Tancredo wing of the Republican Party in English."

I understand that Menendez is trying to earn Obama's good graces after being a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton in the primaries. But did he really compare McCain to Tom Tancredo, the nativist congressman who also sought the GOP nomination in this year's primaries? Senator, I know Tom Tancredo. I've written about Tom Tancredo. And John McCain is no Tom Tancredo. One of the few things that these men share is a strong dislike for one another. In one debate, McCain described Tancredo's explanation of what makes someone an American as "beyond my realm of thinking."

Others on the left are also lending a hand to Democratic efforts at damage control. They include groups dedicated to the admirable goal of achieving comprehensive immigration reform. What is not so admirable is the way that these groups have turned on McCain, whom not long ago they praised for fighting the good fight on the immigration issue. Now they claim that McCain has flip-flopped. Baloney. They're the ones who flip-flopped, and for no grander reason than because we're in an election year.

"We are stunned," declared Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a Washington-based liberal-leaning organization in a statement. "A Spanish-language ad approved by Sen. John McCain accuses Sen. Obama and the Democrats of derailing immigration reform? He knows better. The whole political world knows better. Comprehensive immigration reform was blocked not by Democrats but by Republicans. ... Immigrants and Latinos are intelligent. They know the difference between fact and fiction."

I always appreciate it when non-Latinos are patronizing and tell me what I should or shouldn't know. I know this much: Some folks inside the Beltway are so eager to put a Democrat in the White House that they're putting party before truth. They include Latino groups such as the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund who, as Sharry said, should know better.

During a conference call this week with reporters, NCLR Vice President Cecilia Munoz also criticized the ad and called immigration an issue that "tends to determine who the good guys are and the bad guys are for Latinos." That implies that these advocacy groups can tell the difference. That's the point. Blinded by partisanship, they haven't a clue.

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