What do ‘community organizers’ do? What did Obama do as a ‘community organizer’? What is ACORN? How has it been funded?

Stanley Kurtz  writes in a must-read article in the New York Post:

To understand the roots of the subprime-mortgage crisis, look to ACORN’s Madeline Talbott. And to see how Talbott was able to work her mischief, look to Barack Obama.

Then you’ll truly know what community organizers do.

 

 Here is the lowdown on ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has a significant share in culpability for the sub-prime disaster – as mentioned in the preceding post.

The report explains that Acorn is:

 Implicated in numerous reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during the 2004 election. 

In a side by side comparison, Palin would be more qualified to be president than Obama.

This amusing but factual comparison in Redstate sets it out clearly:  Palin on the left (for once), Obama on the right. Read the whole thing at www.redstate.com posted on 30 August 2008 by Jeff Emanuel.

But as we all know, she isn’t.

This from Power Line:

Opponents of energy development like to claim that it is hopeless to drill for oil, since it would take so long to get it flowing. Barack Obama, for example, recently claimed that if Congress lifts the offshore drilling ban, it will take seven years to get any oil. Obama supported this assertion by misrepresenting a report by the Energy Information Administration. If you read this post, you already know how the Left is misusing that report.

Today the Institute for Energy Research followed up with more information about misuse of that report. I want to focus on this point:

EIA’s analysis assumes that leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. Yet, off the coast of California, some of these resources have already been leased. A report from Wall Street research house Sanford C. Bernstein says that California actually could start producing new oil within one year if the moratoria were lifted. The California oil is under shallow water and already has been explored. Drilling platforms have been in place since before the moratorium.

There are other areas, too, where pumping could begin in months, not years. Obviously full exploitation of our energy resources will take longer. But that is an argument for starting quickly, not an argument for delay. And we can at least begin to get relief from high energy costs quite rapidly.

 

ENERGY POLICY

By Lisa Benson

www.townhall.com/funnies

 

 It needs to be said over and over again: It is not the size of the Jewish state that troubles the Arabs, and Muslims in general; it is the fact that a Jewish state exists at all.

Their only solution to the Arab-Israel conflict is the total elimination of Israel; is and always has been. That is why ‘Peace Now’ and all the treaties and the conferences and  the diplomatic missions and the UN interferences and the ‘Land for Peace’ optimism have not amounted to a hill of beans. That is why Arafat turned down an offer that would have given the Palestinians 95 percent of the ‘territorial demands’ they pretended to for a time. That is why all efforts by President Bush, or Secretary of State Rice (who seems grossly to misunderstand the whole issue), or Tony Blair, or anyone else to broker a peace deal are doomed to failure. That is why Israel’s total withdrawal from Gaza made no difference to the constant claim that Gaza is ‘occupied territory’, and why if Israel stops building settlements on the West Bank there will be no cheers, not the least expression of satisfaction from the Palestinians, but only more complaints and more demands, and no doubt active aggression, as there is now from Gaza.

The conflict can only be settled by total victory for the Arab-Islamic aggressors, or such a show of strength by the West as a whole in support of Israel that  the aggressors give up.

What is the likelihood of  the West so wholeheartedly supporting Israel? Not high.  And when the whole of Europe has come to be dominated by its growing Islamic populations – which is very likely to happen –  the chances for Israel’s survival will be greatly diminished. 

Why this persistent willful blindness on the part of Western leaders to the realities of the conflict? 

One may as well ask, why two thousand years of persecution of the Jews?

The Jews are among that minority of peoples who have done no harm to other peoples in all that time. They are hugely benefactors of all mankind. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Jews – the vast majority of whom were miserably poor and oppressed –  were falsely, absurdly, and wickedly accused of plotting to dominate the world. The forgery known as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were (as Professor Norman Cohn has brilliantly demonstrated in his book by this name) a ‘Warrant for Genocide’ – the genocide of the Holocaust. The wave of revulsion that went round the world when the Nazi death-camps were liberated and the atrocities committed by the Germans became known, translated itself into an abhorrence of  ‘racism’ – but the only people who have not been the beneficiaries of that abhorrence are the Jews themselves.

Now Muslims frequently and openly preach that they desire a caliphate to rule the whole world under Sharia law. Their holy books prescribe world-domination. Their method of achieving it is to carry out  acts of murderous violence with the utmost cruelty, such as beheading victims – even young children –  or burning them to death; blowing people up en masse in trains, flying planes into office buildings so that workers inside them are forced to choose between incinerating themselves or jumping hundreds of feet to their deaths below. At the same time the jihadists of Islam are using the freedoms and tolerance of the West to infiltrate and undermine it.  These things are actually happening.  There is no false accusation here, no forged documents.  But Islam does not stand accused of the evil aim, the atrocities, the crimes, by Western governments. Now that the plot of destruction and domination is real, the politicians, the majority of the intellectual elites and the ‘fourth estate’ of the journalists shake in their boots and pretend that it is not happening. Now that the threat is real, they are really afraid. They cringe before the monsters who are attacking and humiliating them. Shame on them all!

 Jonah Goldberg writes in Townhall:

‘Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.

People ask, "Why is there poverty in the world?" It’s a silly question. Poverty is the default human condition. It is the factory preset of this mortal coil. As individuals and as a species, we are born naked and penniless, bereft of skills or possessions. Likewise, in his civilizational infancy man was poor, in every sense. He lived in ignorance, filth, hunger and pain, and he died very young, either by violence or disease.

The interesting question isn’t "Why is there poverty?" It’s "Why is there wealth?" Or: "Why is there prosperity here but not there?"

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.’

Read the whole thing here – it’s very good. 

Three obvious battle-cries for the McCain campaign:

LOWER TAXES

DRILL FOR OIL 

VICTORY IN IRAQ

They’re short and sweet. They need to be called out loud and clear and often. 

And they are winners. 

Read this article about sharia-compliant financial deals and why they are a bad idea.

 Human rights groups are too preoccupied with blaming Israel for defending itself against Palestinian terrorists to notice or care what the Muslims are doing to Christians.

Here is another extract from  Robert Spencer’s study:

 What Justus Reid Weiner, an international human
rights lawyer, stated in December 2007 about Christians
in Palestinian areas applies to Christians in the Islamic
world generally: “The systematic persecution of Christian
Arabs living in Palestinian areas is being met with nearly
total silence by the international community, human rights
activists, the media and NGOs.” He said that if nothing were
done, no Christians would be left there in fifteen years, for
Christian leaders are being forced to abandon their followers
to the forces of radical Islam.”70