The conventional wisdom is that this upcoming election will be Obama’s in a walk-away.  Could be.  But on the chance he loses, Democrats are already writing the narrative they will use to explain it.

In a speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention in Cincinnati, [NY governor David] Paterson also suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama by Senator McCain in the presidential contest would be a victory for racism.

And he knows this because everything can be blames on racism.  The preceding paragraph notes:

Governor Paterson, who became New York’s first black governor following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer, is lashing out at the press for describing him as an "accidental governor," implying in a speech that the term’s frequent usage was motivated by racial bias.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names are racist! 

The article actually goes on to note, contrary to Paterson’s contention that only he, as a black governor, has been termed "accidental", 3 other people (including President Bush) and 6 separate examples of politicians being referred to as "accidental".  The man has got a serious chip on his shoulder.

[tags]New York,Governor David Paterson,racism,Barack Obama,NAACP[/tags]

Not content to send mere reporters with Obama when he visits Iraq, all the Big Three network news organizations are going to send their anchors.  Which, of course, they also did for McCain.  Or not.

While Thursday’s New York Times reported that the anchors from all three network newscasts will be joining Barack Obama on his trip to Iraq, they showed no such interest in following John McCain during his visit to Iraq in March. During the week of March 16, McCain’s trip received only four full-length stories during the combined ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news program coverage. Three of those stories were on NBC’s "Nightly News," one of which focused on McCain’s mistaken comment about Iran funding Al Qaeda in Iraq. ABC’s "World News" did only one full-length story on McCain’s Iraq trip, which mentioned the gaffe. The CBS "Evening News" was by far the worst, devoting only 31 words to the Republican nominee’s Iraq visit during the entire week of evening news coverage.

(Emphasis in original.)  This is pointing out yet another disparity from the media regarding news coverage that the Times is now having to grudgingly recognize.

Even the Times article acknowledged that McCain’s Iraq trip received little coverage: "Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad…But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates."

Oh, but it’s not actually true that the media are ignoring McCain, it’s just that the fact "feeds into concerns" that there is a problem.  Like I said, grudgingly.

And by the way, how much better must the security situation be in Iraq that the Big Three feel comfortable sending their top dogs to the field? 

[tags]Barack Obama,John McCain,liberal media bias[/tags]

What does it mean, “He’s smart” or “He’s very intelligent?” Largely on the left, we see citations of “that candidate” is very smart or the other one is not so much (typically oddly enough the “smart” ones lean left in the view of the left leaning commentators. Whether that is an attempt at validating their own left leaning predilections or explaining reasons why they admire that particular candidate I will not guess.) What I fail to understand is how they come up with their estimation that a given candidate is smart. I know how I figure that a programmer, physicist, or mathmetician is smart. By looking at their work and asking is it clean? Is it beautiful?

If one was to ask whether an artist was talented. One would ask another performer (or artist in the same field) or perhaps a critic (to be distinguished from a “reviewer”).  However, talent at art is not exactly the same as smart.

Currently, Mr Obama is the politician most often touted as “smart” by the left. Some months ago, blog neighbor David Schraub declaimed that both Mr Obama and Ms Clinton were both “very smart.” What I fail to understand is on what basis he might make such a claim. For the two examples above, one has to look at some sort of body of work to estimate whether a person is smart. There is, of course, another time honored means of deciding if a person is smart, which is to interact personally with that person for an extended period of time. That method of determination by the average citizen with respect to a national candidate is unlikely or impossible so as to be discounted. That pretty much leaves, their corpus of work, which in the case of lawyers like Mr Obama and Ms Clinton would be their body of written opinions.

Rhetoric is of course another key people use to decide whether a person is intelligent. However, in this age of the teleprompter and speechwriters the facility at oration is a actors skill.  However, it is a stretch to thing that those claiming these people are intelligent is based on facility at reading from a teleprompter and calling it oration.

Yet strangely it seems such offerings are absent in the case of these individuals. There are no publicly available opinions written by either of these candidates. Odd that, no? Mr Obama was, for a time, an academic lawyer. To be an academic in the publish or perish environment, yet not to publish seems more than a little strange. If this is a case of lawyers who have read his and her work, deciding that it is good, but that it is to “technical” or abstract or otherwise unfit for general consumption … that seems elitest and very likely to be concealing of a lie.

I would guess that the likeliest reason that these people think, in this case, that Mr Obama is highly intelligent is because they’ve heard it second hand. It is a “meme” if you will, spread by his supporters (and the press) that Mr Obama is very bright. But the question is, why is this to be given credence?
So, if you think, the candidate of the hour, Mr Obama is smart. Why do you think that? On what do you base your appraisal? How does that compare with how you decide or would decide if a candidate is smart?
(disclaimer: I should note, I have no opinion at all on the matter of whether Mr Obama is “smart” or not. I feel I’m not qualified (I’ve read nothing he’s written (or had ghost written)) nor do I have the contact with him. Furthermore, I’m a little disinclined to think “smartness” is a qualification for President. Of our the 19th century Presidents the smartest arguably was John Quincy Adams. Was he the “best” President? Obviously not. Woodrow Wilson was alleged to be very bright … consider the League of Nations and the stellar treaty of Versailles. Clearly intelligence is not what it is cracked up to be in the political arena)

So John McCain is left to address Phil Gramm’s remarks that we have become a nation of whiners who are merely in a mental recession?

What exactly is a mental recession? Well, let’s do a little comparison of a mental recession with an economic depression.

Below is a photo (courtesy Yahoo!News) in which we see people queued up… waiting.

Now take a look at a photo (courtesy National Park Service) in which we see another group of people queued up… waiting.

The difference?

In the first photo, the people are waiting to buy the latest iPhone (circa 2008), while in the second photo, the people are waiting to be given something to eat (circa 1930s).

First photo = mental recession.
Second photo = economic depression.

First photo = nation of whiners.
Second photo = nation of those eager, but unable, to provide for their families.

[tag]phil gramm, nation of whiners, mental recession, obama, john mccain[/tag]

During my recent interview with author Jane Hampton Cook, I asked her how she thought history would view President Bush. One of the interesting things she mentioned was how the President was more concerned with doing what he felt was right then what was popular or politically expedient and as a result history will likely look more favorably on his presidency than the press does now. I tend to agree with this view.

It’s even more refreshing when members of the mainstream media begin to understand this dynamic. This article (from Great Britain, no less) nails it perfectly and at the same time calls liberals and Europeans on the carpet for their deranged hatred of the President (hat tip: Instapundit):

This is a man who has the courage of his convictions.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess. That is what happened in WWI, WWII, and the Balkans.

Bush is just showing us what a bunch of dangerous ditherers we are and we hate him for it. Naturally.

And the Olympics. Bush said right from the beginning that he’s going to the opening ceremony because he saw the whole boycott thing as silly and counterproductive.

Compare that with Sarkozy who has changed his mind twice so far and to Gordon Brown who, well… err.

Not much leadership from Europe here, as usual, just doublespeak. Once again, it is to Bush that we look for leadership.

Bush may not have the slickness of his predecessor, but he is a man you can trust and who prefers to tell it like it is.

This is refreshing, and very scary for us who are used to our politicians always talking grandly about principles and hiding behind political mumbo-speak.

The fact is you guys hate Mr Bush because he is not a hypocrite and you are used to hypocrites as your leaders. We hate what we don’t understand.

Yes, yes, all you bleeding heart liberals are cringing out there. I can just hear you. But the fact is, Mr Bush has had to take some very tough decisions and the world needs people who can not only talk but also act tough and admit mistakes.

Well said.

In response to last nights essay, which was intended to be satirical,  the following question arose to my remark:

The only serious question [raised in the prior post] is whether mingling of groups is desired or not.

Commenter Mr Boonton asked:

… what do you think about mingling of groups? I think they are on a whole to be encouraged with single-group states being the solution of last resort.

This is a serious question, which begs answer. The conventional wisdom in Jouvenel’s Babylon [Babylon: the multi-cultural/multi-ethnic mix of modern society] that by mixing with “other” we learn tolerance and to appreciate those around us. However there are a few points to consider, and to do so, I’ll resort to the dread bullet list (and more below the fold): Read the rest of this entry

No, not Bush’s.  This group would love to have the same ratings as Dubya.  In most cases, based on who you talk to, only 1/3rd of the number of people who approve of what Bush is doing think Congress is any good.

The percentage of voters who give Congress good or excellent ratings has fallen to single digits for the first time in Rasmussen Reports tracking history. This month, just 9% say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Most voters (52%) say Congress is doing a poor job, which ties the record high in that dubious category.

Last month, 11% of voters gave the legislature good or excellent ratings. Congress has not received higher than a 15% approval rating since the beginning of 2008.

The percentage of Democrats who give Congress positive ratings fell from 17% last month to 13% this month. The number of Democrats who give Congress a poor rating remained unchanged. Among Republicans, 8% give Congress good or excellent ratings, up just a point from last month. Sixty-five percent (65%) of GOP voters say Congress is doing a poor job, down a single point from last month.

Voters not affiliated with either party are the most critical of Congressional performance. Just 3% of those voters give Congress positive ratings, down from 6% last month. Sixty-three percent (63%) believe Congress is doing a poor job, up from 57% last month.

For comparison, most other polls give Bush +/- 30%.  Hating polls as I do, I would only bring this up to counter those who use them as a bludgeon for Bush and his policies.  If popular opinion is your bellwether for whether a course of action should be taken, the Democratic Congress has less of a mandate than the President.

Now, we can debate as to what the poll means, and that can have as many explanations as people polled.  But if you want to claim that Bush is doing a poor job, you must also say that it could be worse; we could have Congress in charge.

[tags]polls,approval rating,Congress[/tags]

I’m not a great student of recent politics, that is the politics of my lifetime, instead more of a casual observer or johnny come lately, in that my interest in politics is quite young. When I was in college and until just a few years ago, Politics was much like the weather, people talk about it, have opinions and all, but it really didn’t touch me (actually did far less than the weather) and the “little guy” of which I number have about as much effect on the weather as we do on federal politics. I am not well aware of the history of Mr Helms, nor have I walked a mile in his shoes nor understand how he thinks and sees the world. I don’t hate him, I don’t love him (any more than I would another stranger).

Mr Jessie Helms has died. Every single one of the liberal blogs I read have failed to say anything gracious (and some are definitely ungracious) at the passing of a man from this mortal coil. On reflection over their attitude on his passing, I find it a good thing that I hold no American and very few foreigners in a similar regard as the beheld Mr Helms. To reiterarate:

There is no American and very few foreign nationals whose death I would celebrate.

As they did today.  I don’t hate as they hate, it seems. I can think of very few men on whose deminse I would react in a similar fashion. I think I had little good to say about the deceased when Mr Hussein and Mr Arafat died.  It seems to me, if you are trying to rid the world of hatred and bigotry, one must start with oneself. In our liturgy, we repeat and strive to uphold each week, these words before the anaphora (Eucharist):

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first….

The confession/statement goes on, but the important phrase (for this discussion) is emphasized. This does not mean I am a worse sinner than Mr Hussein, Josef Stailn, or perhaps Mr Helms. It does mean however, I am the first person whose sins are my concern. It is not for me to address the “other’s” sins while mine are lying plain before me. And … if you (on the left) hate Mr Helms, Mr Bush, or Mr Cheney then that sin is far more important to you to address than anything that those men have done or do that you find unrighteous. And no, I don’t think that to others your sin of hatred is being compared or worse then perception of the sins of those men whom you hate. What I am suggesting is that it is more important for you to address than the other.

Mr Obama is, as we speak, swinging to center. A question for those few who read this blog and support Mr Obama. Apparently, he is reneging on his, perhaps most emphatic primary campaign promse, that of “immediate” pullout from Iraq. I’ve three question(s):

• Do you believe the shift a lie? Why is this the lie and not the prior promise?
• What shift, if taken by Mr Obama, would cause you to no longer support him?
• If there is none, what does mean?

Or, if you want to explain the “shift” is due to “changes on the ground in Iraq”, uhm, those changes have been plain to see for almost the entire primary season. It seems disingenuous to just notice it “now” when it’s politically convenient is not inherently dishonest.

Going into the Democratic primary, it was the conventional wisdom that this would be a walk-away for whomever won the Democrats nod.  With war support low and Bush approval ratings in the tank, it would be no contest.  And when it looked more and more like Obama would be the Democrats’ candidate, the possibility of electing the nation’s first black President is tantalizing.

So then, how is this possible?

With the dust having finally settled after the prolonged Democratic presidential primary, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll shows Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama locked in a statistical dead heat in the race for the White House.

With just over four months remaining until voters weigh in at the polls, the new survey out Tuesday indicates Obama holds a narrow 5-point advantage among registered voters nationwide over the Arizona senator, 50 percent to 45 percent. That represents little change from a similar poll one month ago, when the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee held a 46-43 percent edge over McCain.

CNN Polling Director Keating Holland notes Tuesday’s survey confirms what a string of national polls released this month have shown: Obama holds a slight advantage over McCain, though not a big enough one to constitute a statistical lead.

Frankly, I, too, was prepared early on for a Democratic president.  I thought the combination of history and the Iraq war would sweep a Democrat into the White House, but the polls — first Gallup, now CNN –  keep getting tighter and tighter. 

It’s the Democrats election to lose.  It could happen.

[tags]US politics,US presidential election,Barack Obama,John McCain,polls,CNN[/tags]

Spurred on by the prior post of Doug’s and in attempt to start something more of a conversation here, I’ll offer some thoughts on healthcare.

Liberals and progressives like to hold forth the ideal that healthcare should be affordable and available to everyone. After all, we’re a wealthy country. However, this is one might say a Juan Ponce de Leon gambit, that is holding forth a search for the fountain of life which alas doesn’t exist. Health care suffers from one basic problem, which is so far insurmountable (although I’ll suggest how it might be surmounted at the close of this little essay). The problem is, of course, that health care is infinitely expensive. The amount of care which might be applied to the dying grows almost without bound if one disregards cost. For almost a decade we have been told that the biological “sciences” have been expanding their capabilities exponentially (Moore’s Law) like the computer sciences except … at an even faster rate (the doubling period of capabilities is shorter). However this hasn’t substantially been, as yet, bringing down costs, just making ever more expensive options tantalizingly available. Cancers which would kill 5 years ago are sometimes defeated today, however at great financial cost.

The elephant being missed is, alas, rationing is a necessity. The question is comes down to, how to ration.  Does the market decide unfettered? Do the knuckleheads in our legislative offices decree how rationing will go down. The conservatives would claim that ability to pay is fairest. The liberals and progressives largely deny the existence of the elephant, which is alas either a lie or some other form of self-induced insanity/delusion.  Read the rest of this entry

(Dan Trabue, in a comment here to my previous post on health care, referenced a think tank paper that predicts cost reductions without a loss of effectiveness with a single-payer system, and took issue with my terming this "socialized medicine".  I decided to put my response up as a post.)

From the Wikipedia entry on health care in Canada: "Health care in Canada is funded and delivered through a publicly funded health care system, with most services provided by private entities."  So in Canada, it’s not government-run hospitals but it is a government funded system.  While the writer of this Wikipedia entry insists it’s not truly socialized medicine, the article at the link to the words "socialized medicine" does concede, "The term can refer to any system of medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both", I suppose depending on who you ask.

But who’s in charge of the hospitals or what you want to call it is immaterial, as the outcome is the same.  Britain has government-owned hospitals and Canada doesn’t, but the result is still that bureaucracies make medical decisions instead of doctors and patients.  HMOs were the Left’s bogeyman for years, but their solution is to institute the nation’s, perhaps the world’s, largest HMO/insurance company to make our individual health care decisions.  This makes no sense at all.

From the think tank paper cited:

[The Lewin Group, "a nationally respected nonpartisan
consulting firm"] estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.

The Lewin Group is inexplicably closing its eyes to the Canadian system, blue-skying his prediction.  The Canadian system uses both government- and employer-based payment system, utilizing private insurance/doctors/hospitals, and they are in crisis.  They are not saving money (Claude Castonguay, quoted in the original post, notes that rationing and "injecting massive amounts of new money" has not helped).  They most certainly do not serve effectively (Wikipedia cites a study showing 57% of Canadians wait 4 or more week to see a specialist).  And it unfortunately affects everyone (read the Wikipedia article sections titled "Government Involvement" and "Private Sector").

Are you really going to believe predictions on the efficiency and cost effectiveness of a massive government program.  No government program of such a size ever comes in under budget; not Medicare, not Social Security, not the Iraq War, nothing. 

The Lewin Group says that the government could bargain for lower costs, and yet Canada’s are skyrocketing.  They may have gone down at the beginning, but as The Acton Institute’s Dr. Donald Condit notes:

Resource consumption increases when people think someone else is shouldering the cost. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman observed, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” More than 60 years of “someone else” paying for health care has led to medical expense inflation. Our predominately third-party reimbursement “system,” beginning after World War II for employees and after Medicare in 1965 for the retired, has resulted in out-of-control spending. Increasing the role of government will spur unbridled medical services consumption and further harm the underserved. Medical resources are limited. An expanded government role in health care will necessarily lead to rationing, shortages of health-care providers, delay in treatment, and deterioration in quality of care.

Medicaid is a socialized medicine microcosm. In that system, price controls and bureaucracy result in rationing by deterring provider participation and delaying treatment, with subsequent deterioration in quality of care. Affluent individuals are able to access better health care outside of any government system.

And this "Medicare model" is what the EPI plan wants to take the "best elements" of, which they only enumerate later on as the federal government administering it.  How can the Left possibly say they care more for the less-fortunate in one breath, and in the other hold up health care rationing as "caring"?  This makes no sense at all.

Canada’s system currently compares favorably to the US in terms of a couple of cherry-picked statistics, but that’s like judging a pyramid scheme based on the first few generations.  They are losing on other fronts, like a drain of doctors.  And they are now at the tipping point of that pyramid scheme, where the choice is either returning a bigger role to the private sector (what Castonguay called "radical" and what conservatives call "sensible") or sliding further down the slope to socialism.  The Left, not wishing to have their utopian vision challenged, will no doubt push for the latter.

Read the rest of this entry

Mr Obama has denounced Mr Clark’s remarks on foreign policy and Mr McCain’s service, being shot down, tortured, and so on. The remark:

When moderator Bob Schieffer interjected that “Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down”, Clark responded: “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

Well, no. But, Mr Obama is running for President. Is he doing that out of loyalty to his country and a sense of duty … or is it out of a personal drive for power or personal aggrandizement. That is a question that doesn’t need to be asked of Mr McCain. He put his life on the line for the country. Mr Obama has not. The distinction remains. Mr Obama, in theory, may be as patriotic as the next veteran like Mr McCain and thousands of others. But … unlike the veterans and those serving … and I might add like me, his (and my) claims of patriotism remain untested by fire.

No it does not qualify one for President, but it does give us some valuable information about the man and his character. Information which is lacking in the case of Mr Obama.

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Read the rest of this entry

Your taxpayer dollars at work.  Michelle Malkin has the story.

If you don’t know what ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is all about, you better bone up. This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud. A new whistleblower report from the Consumer Rights League claims that Chicago-based ACORN has commingled public tax dollars with political projects. Who in Washington will fight to ensure that your money isn’t being spent on these radical activities?

OK, so why should you care that a "community organization" out of Chicago plays dirty politics?  A real yawner, right?  What’s next, reporting that the sky is blue? 

Malkin gives you a reason to care, by noting who in particular probably won’t be doing any fighting.

Don’t bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who "best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about" — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

Malkin continues with details of voter fraud (pending cases, but also the largest case in Washington state where they were convicted), using federal housing money for electioneering, and mortgage advice that would land them in jail if they were a lender in today’s market. 

Stanley Kurtz has an article with even more details of ACORN’s methods ("in your face", Code-Pink-type confrontation), it’s political aims (socialist), and Obama’s ties to the organization (a lot deeper than we were first led to believe).  If you want to flesh out Obam’s highly-vaunted "community organizer" credentials, you need to read Kurtz’s peek into ACORN.  A small excerpt:

To understand the nature and extent of Acorn’s radicalism, an excellent place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, “ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities.” (For a shorter but helpful piece, try Steven Malanga’s “Acorn Squash.”)
Sol Stern explains that Acorn is the key modern successor of the radical 1960’s “New Left,” with a “1960’s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism” to match. Acorn, says Stern, grew out of “one of the New Left’s silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.” In the 1960’s, NWRO launched a campaign of sit-ins and disruptions at welfare offices. The goal was to remove eligibility restrictions, and thus effectively flood welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would burst. The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

Being a "community organizer" may sound like a refreshing thing to have on a presidential candidate’s resume, but, as with most things, it all depends on what one was organizing for. 

For another peek into ACORN, here’s an article from a guy who was gung-ho about the group itself.  Well, until he actually joined it.

So now, after Wright and Pfleger and Ayers and all the other people he kept company with but has thrown under the bus, is ACORN next?  He could pull out his standard line, "this is not the ACORN I knew", but that excuse is wearing rather thin. 

If he doesn’t distance himself from a group he worked for for 3 1/2 years, then his radical leftist views will be all the more evident.  If he does back away (and if he can do that for his pastor of 20 years, ACORN is fair game), then he continues to show himself to be a man who either has made very poor decisions all of his life, or shows himself to be cravenly and politically expedient when dealing with his inconvenient past.  Either way, he shows himself to be someone we don’t want in the Oval Office.

[tags]ACORN,Barack Obama,community organizer,Chicago,socialism,Sol Stern[/tags]