More on the sorry state of the country during this "post-racial" administration...

From Newsbusters:

AP Shills for NAACP Against Wishes of Black Citizens in North Carolina

The Associated Press on Monday published a news item that would more correctly be called a shameless press release on behalf of the NAACP.

Writer Allen G. Breed followed the liberal group to Raleigh for a recent show of kabuki theatre. The cause? Getting the Wake County school system to continue the antiquated method of forcibly busing students to far-flung neighborhoods in pursuit of racial integration.

Never mind that the minority-heavy county brought sweeping changes to the school board by giving Republicans control last year - on the very platform of ending integration. And never mind that the majority of African-Americans living there are either opposed or indifferent to school integration. The NAACP knows what is best for them.

Breed predictably began with the headline "Fear of 'Resegregation' Fuels Unrest in NC." What followed was a history lesson obviously designed to drum up more fear:

In the annals of desegregation, Raleigh is barely a footnote.

Integration came relatively peacefully to the North Carolina capital. There was no "stand in the schoolhouse door," no need of National Guard escorts or even a federal court order.

Nearly 50 years passed - mostly uneventfully, at least until a new school board majority was elected last year on a platform supporting community schools.

The result has been turmoil.

When a mainstream media news item uses a delicate word like "turmoil," you can usually take that as a sign of some unhinged liberal getting arrested. In this case, that's exactly what happened: four activists, including the NAACP state leader, disrupted a school board meeting in front of media cameras, sat in the chairs belonging to the school officials, and waited to be pulled away by police.

This apparently made them heroes in the eyes of Breed, who contacted at least one of them for a quote:

"We're not going to sit idly by while they turn the clock back on the blood, sweat and tears and wipe their feet on the sacrifices of so many that have enabled us to get to the place we are today," says the Rev. William J. Barber II, head of the state NAACP chapter and one of the four protesters arrested for trespassing at the June 15 board meeting.

If Barber is so worried about those trying to turn back the clock, his outrage is aimed in the wrong direction. The new school board was elected to do that very thing by voters in the county, many of them minorities, tired of the pointless practice of integration.

Raleigh's local News and Observer provides information from 2009 that got conveniently ignored by the AP:

Winning candidates in Tuesday's Wake County school board elections achieved their victories by tapping into widespread resentment about the schools and offering up the rallying cry "neighborhood schools."

So these proponents of localized education were swept into power by a population ready and willing to "turn back the clock" on school integration.

But wait, it gets worse:

Interviews with candidates and supporters showed that other factors in the near-sweep by opponents of current school board policies included:

Lackluster support for current board diversity policies by Democrats and even opposition by a significant percentage of African-Americans, as reflected in a private poll taken by a Democratic operative last month.

A core of discontent not only with board policies on diversity but also with year-round schools and what opponents called an arrogant and distant board and administration.

Indeed, that internal poll conducted by a Democrat campaign operative in September 2009 found that some 46 percent of black voters opposed forced busing, 14 percent had no opinion, and only 39 percent approved.

In other words, the NAACP is staging protests and spouting about civil rights against the very wishes of nearly half the African-Americans in Wake County.

The AP did eventually get around to admitting that some folks wanted to repeal integration... only to reprimand them for being ignorant:

With 140,000 students in 160 schools, Wake County was the largest of about 70 districts across the nation using socio-economic status to maintain diversity. The system was considered a model for those looking for a way around race-based assignment scheme rejected by the courts.

"It (the Wake County system) really was a beacon, a flag around which more and more people were rallying as they saw the positive effects of this," says sociologist Gerald Grant, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University and author of the book "Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh."

But some parents grew tired of sending their children off on long bus rides. Others said the policy may have brought whites and blacks together, but it wasn't really helping blacks educationally.

And there are those who say people forgot how bad the bad old days were.

"For folks who were there and lived through it, there's a real sense of a collective forgetting, a collective amnesia," says James Leloudis, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who was in high school when the county system integrated. "There is a kind of tragic disremembering."

Part of the story is that Wake County is increasingly populated by people who did not grow up here and do not feel the tug or burden of that history. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about half of Wake County's residents were born outside North Carolina.

So let's break this down. First, courts kept striking down racially-driven school district schemes, but the geniuses in Wake County circumvented this by calling their scheme economically-driven, and this trick was heralded by liberal community organizers nationwide.

Yet despite the apparent brilliance of this scheme, voters were unable to appreciate their good fortunes. Kids didn't like being stuck on a bus for an hour, parents didn't like PTA meetings on the other side of the city, and minority children were still not matching white peers on performance. The whole scheme was wasting money, time, fuel, and resources, all for very little gain.

And then outsiders moved to Raleigh with their silly ideas of attending the school nearest home. Impressionable young black families, who don't harbor resentment from the 1950s, are being convinced that forced busing is a stupid idea. Middle age NAACP activists are the true voice of the black community and know what is best for these naïve young blacks.

This is what the Associated Press calls an informative news report about a complex issue.

But it wasn't done yet! No article on race would be complete without a random shot at tea parties:

A columnist for The News & Observer in Raleigh recently called Margiotta and Tedesco "a couple of carpetbagging Northerners." And Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker referred to the board majority as "people who are not from the area, who don't share our values," and announced the formation of a group to ensure that any new student assignment plan doesn't violate the state constitutional guarantee of a sound education.

The NAACP's Barber admits busing supporters were caught napping last fall. But with five seats - including Margiotta's - up for grabs next year, they are determined to keep up the heat to counter what "the anti-diversity, right-wing, tea party-sympathizing, resegregationist caucus is doing in Wake County."

That's right, folks. If you think it's pointless to make a black student sit on a bus for an hour to attend a school miles away from friends and family, you're a right-wing bigot.

The AP did not quote one single black voter who disagreed with the NAACP. It didn't cite any polling data on how local minorities felt, and it didn't share any facts on how ineffective the scheme has been.

How kind of the AP to care so much about the plight of poor minorities in North Carolina. Perhaps when the news wire gets done propping up liberal activist groups, it can return to reporting on actual news from that state - like say, perhaps, the ongoing investigation against former governor Mike Easley, which the AP has all but ignored in recent months.

Since the local affairs of North Carolina are of so much interest to readers nationwide, it would only make sense to report on all of them.

Or do nationwide readers only need to hear about the NAACP's grasp at relevance?

Once again, the brilliant Mark Steyn:

Stimulus Hits a Pothole (JWR)

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several "stimulus" projects - every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said "PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK" with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a "PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT." There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned scarified pavement, followed by an "END OF ROAD WORKS" sign, until the next "stimulus" project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop.

I don't know why one of the least fiscally debauched states in the Union needs funds from "the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" to repair random stretches of highway, especially stretches that were perfectly fine until someone came along to dig them up in order to access "stimulus" funding. I would have asked one of those men with a shovel, as depicted on the sign. But there were none to be found. Usually in New Hampshire, they dig up the road, regrade or repave it, while the flagmen stand guard until it's all done. But here a certain federal torpor seemed to hang in the eerie silence.

Still, what do I know? Evidently, it's stimulated the sign-making industry, putting America back to work by putting up "PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK" signs every 200 yards across the land. And at 300 bucks a pop the signage alone should be enough to launch an era of unparalleled prosperity, assuming America's gilded sign magnates don't spend their newfound wealth on Bahamian vacations and European imports. Perhaps if the president were to have his All-Seeing O logo lovingly hand-painted onto each sign, it would stimulate the economy even more, if only when they were taken down and auctioned on eBay.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn't afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world's biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can't compete with Obama's $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say "to less effect," that's not strictly true: Due to Obama, one of the least-indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted - and getting ever more so. We've become the third most debt-ridden country, after Japan and Italy. According to last month's IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He's spending your future. And by "future" I don't mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on "the rich," but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in "the richest 5 percent" before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama.

But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, "Medicare is a government program that works really well," and if "we're able to get something right like Medicare," we should have more "confidence" about being able to do it for everyone.

On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is "unsustainable" and "running out of money."

By the way, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician's contradictory statements, these weren't made a year or even a week apart, but during the same presidential speech in Portsmouth, N.H. At any rate, in order to "control costs," Obama says we need to introduce a new trillion-dollar government entitlement. It's a good thing he's the smartest president of all time and the greatest orator since Socrates because otherwise one might easily confuse him with some birdbrained Bush type. But, if we take him at his word, then a trillion-dollar public expenditure that "controls costs" presumably means he's planning on reducing private health expenditure - such as, say, your insurance plan - by at least a trillion. Or he'll be raising a trillion dollars' worth of revenue. Either way, under Obama nothing is certain but death panels and taxes - i.e., a vast enervating statism and the confiscation of the fruits of your labors required to pay for it.

That's why the "stimulus" flopped. It didn't just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats' political priorities overrode everything else. If you're a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap-and-trade is promising increased regulatory costs, and health "reform" wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama's leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he's spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust's settled, and you get a better sense of just how broke he's going to make you. For this level of "community organization," there aren't enough of "the rich" to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democrat terms. It's no surprise that the president can't make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare because that's not what it's about - and for all his cool he can't quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans "are losing faith in Barack Obama."

"Losing faith"? Oh, no! Fall on your knees and beseech the One: "Give me a sign, O Lord!"

But he has. They're all along empty highways across rural New Hampshire: "This Massive Expansion Of Wasteful Statism Brought To You By Obama Marketing Inc."

Obama's Obsession with Race

Race is a very delicate subject in America. Although we are almost 150 years past the Civil War, the stain of slavery still plagues us today. Of course, no one who survived that era is alive today. However, the inability of the Republicans to stop the Democrats from ending Reconstruction, has single-handily allowed the Black population to continue to be oppressed long after the last shots were fired.

In fact, even as late as the 1960's, equality was just a dream for many African-Americans. I still remember the stark racism of separate water fountains, "coloreds only" signs at the Woolworth lunch counters and the riots that plagued America at the turn of the next decade. Growing up in Tennessee, it was all around. After I moved to Texas, in 1969, things remained brutal for the Black population. Rare was a Black person even seen in North Dallas, unless they were there to clean someone's house, or mow their lawn. In sports, Black Cowboy players could not stay at the same hotels as their White counterparts, and they were often treated as second class citizens by the media.

And yet, even though the Black population was fighting for their equal rights, which of course, should never even have been an issue, Black families stayed together, children graduated high school (and college) and unemployment - while not ideal - was not far off from the national averages.

So what makes today's Black community different? Why are their children dropping out at an alarming rate? Why are their father's nowhere to be found?

Well, the NAACP thinks the problem is racism, and clearly, so does President Obama. But who are the racists?

According to the NAACP, as well as the Democrat Party, the real racists are conservatives and, by extension, the Tea Party movement. So let's look back a few years...

Who was it that fought against Reconstruction, which kept the "Negroes" in their place? Who was it that created the Ku Klux Klan? Although President Lyndon Johnson eventually signed the Civil Rights Bill, it was ex-Klansman and Senator Robert Byrd, along with many Democrats who filibustered the bill. Byrd, of the course, the longstanding leader of the Democrat Party, who passed away last week, who once said:

"I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

It was the Democrats who fought against integration of the races. In fact, while it's a dirty little secret amongst the Democrats, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., himself, was a Republican. Of course, so was Abraham Lincoln.

So did the Democrats and Republicans simply reverse sides? Of course not. The Democrats knew that they were fighting a losing battle. It wasn't that they simply changed their opinions. No, what they did was far more sinister. What they did, in effect, was use their rhetoric to successfully enslave the African-American population.

And boy did it ever work!

Under the guise of "caring," the Dems began passing legislation which simply destroyed the fabric of the Black community. Expanding welfare - which allowed women to raise babies without the father around, redirecting education - which gave power to the State, instead of where it belongs, in the hands of the parents and basically giving away the farm to those who should have earned it and created their own American Dream.

Of course, we all know the lesson of teaching a man to fish, instead of giving him a fish to eat. Why would anyone learn how to survive and excel if the government (read: Democrats) will take of you instead. When that happens, a Nanny State ensues - which is what's happening throughout the country now, thanks to the filibuster-proof government.

What this all has led to is the degradation of the Black community. And unfortunately, many of their leaders are on the take as well. Where we had leaders like MLK - who once said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," we have Malik Shabazz, the leader of the New Black Panther Party, who says, "You want freedom you’re going to have to kill some crackers. You’re going to have to kill some of their babies."

While the African-American community has reason to be angry, they have been fed so much crap by the Democrats that they feel owed. It is no longer a case where each individual is responsible for himself. According to the gospel of Black leaders, like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, the White man hasn't given us our due.

When you expect someone else to give you opportunity, you are enslaved. That is simply a fact of life. And that is why President Obama has been so damaging to race relations in this country. It's almost as if he believes the Black community can't exceed by themselves. While his racism is more subdued, other leaders have been very outspoken. The NAACP, once the beacon of light for a growing community, has become so irrelevant that they also have to find racism where it no longer exists.

Whether it was their call to arms over a greeting card, based on space exploration, which mentioned "Black Holes" (the NAACP either doesn't understand that a Black Hole is a scientific term for a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape, or they do know but don't care), to condemning the Tea Party movement for making racist comments that clearly weren't made.

The more they scream "racism," the more irrelevant they become and by becoming so irrelevant, they set race relations way back.

But when I read what President Obama said about Al-Qaeda, it proved to me that this is not just a problem with the NAACP, but it has infected the entire Democrat leadership. This is what he said:

(From ABCNews.com) Speaking about the Uganda bombings, the president said, "What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains."

I had to read that three times because I could not believe what I saw. According to Barrack Obama, the terror organization of Al-Qaeda is racist because they do not regard "African life as valuable in of it's self." Furthermore, as the article mentions, he takes task with Al-Qaeda because "it's racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations."

What this means is that President Obama does not look at the fact that Al-Qaeda is evil because they kill innocent people across the globe. No, they are evil because they aren't giving Blacks the opportunity for advancement!

I have never heard such a ridiculous garbage come out of the mouth of an American President and add this to the comment he made last week, that Israeli's do not like him because his middle name is "Hussein" - forget the fact that most Israeli's liked King Hussein from Jordan - and you can see what I mean. It's all about Race to him.

Remember, this is the man who condemned the the Cambridge, Mass. police department for arresting his "friend," and called them "stupid," when all they were doing was their job. This is the President who has ordered his Attorney General to not prosecute the two members of the New Black Panther Party who were clearly violating the voter intimidation laws.

And now, J. Christian Adams - an ex-Justice official who quit over the handling of the voter intimidation case - told Megyn Kelly, on FOX News, that "There is a pervasive hostility within the civil rights division at the Justice Department toward these sorts of cases." He added that he believes the Justice Department has a policy now of not pursuing voting rights cases against white victims.

What this is doing is pitting Whites against Blacks in an era where we should have long ago buried our racial divisiveness. Anyone who has been to a Tea Party can attest that not only are there no racist/anti-Black tendencies, but that people of all colors and races are welcome with open arms to join.

The same can not be said for the NAACP. They even went so far as the condemn a Black man, who was beaten up by SEIU thugs for handing out flyers that disagreed with their agenda. It is very apparent that this President has not only turned a blind eye to reverse discrimination, but that he actively supports it.

Who are the real racists?

Blockbuster report from Doug Ross (reported on FOX News)...

'We Will Not Be Silenced': Democrats Produce Documentary Alleging Rampant Vote Fraud by Obama Campaign vs. Hillary in 2008 Primaries

Referring to the controversial 2008 Democrat presidential primary, Carolyn Tackett asks, "Was Barack Obama selected rather than elected?."

Fox & Friends had an explosive interview with Gigi Gaston, a writer/director who has made a documentary outlining the rampant voter fraud perpetrated by the Obama campaign during the 2008 primaries against Hillary Clinton. Gaston is a lifelong Democrat whose grandfather was a Democratic governor of Massachusetts...

Gaston is not some partisan hack but someone who cares deeply about the election process and democracy. Gaston presents compelling evidence in We Will Not Be Silenced that Barack Obama was selected by the DNC, not elected by the people.

Gaston's website explains that she began investigating to debunk the claims of vote fraud:

As Americans, we expect certain liberties and rights that were granted us by our forefathers, who wrote documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. "We the people" expect that these fundamental rights will always be protected. However, in the current Democratic Presidential Primary, this has not been the case. We believe The Democratic National Committee (DNC) made a grave error by depriving American voters of their choice of Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee. Senator Clinton, by all accounts, except caucuses, won the Primary Election and, therefore, should be the 2008 Democratic Nominee. That didn't happen, due largely to illegitimate and illegal acts. We have interviews of many accounts from caucus states recounting threats, intimidation, lies, stolen documents, falsified documents, busing in voters in exchange for paying for "dinners," etc. There are at least 2000 complaints, in Texas alone, of irregularities directed towards the Obama Campaign, that have lead to a very fractured and broken Democratic Party.

This documentary is about the disenfranchising of American citizens by the Democratic Party and the Obama Campaign. We the People have made this film. Democrats have sent in their stories from all parts of America. We want to be heard and let the country know how our party has sanctioned the actions of what we feel are Obama Campaign "Chicago Machine" dirty politics. We believe this infamous campaign of "change" from Chicago encouraged and created an army to steal caucus packets, falsify documents, change results, allow unregistered people to vote, scare and intimidate Hillary supporters, stalk them, threaten them, lock them out of their polling places, silence their voices and stop their right to vote, which is, of course, all documented in "We Will Not Be Silenced."

"We Will Not Be Silenced" is about the people who fight back by simply telling their stories: Teachers, professors, civil rights activists, lawyers, janitors, physicists, ophthalmologists, accountants, mathematicians, retirees - all bound together by their love of America and Democracy. They will tell us their experiences and how they feel betrayed by their own party. They will discuss how their party has disenfranchised them and how, when they saw and reported multiple instances of fraud, everyone turned a blind eye. Rather than support and protect the voices and votes of its loyal members, the DNC chose to sweep this under the rug by looking the other way, or using ceremony and quasi-investigations to assuage angry voters. It is our opinion there never before has been such a "dirty" campaign; the campaign that has broken the hearts and spirits of American voters, who once believed in the Democractic voting system.

We are not angry liberals; we are disappointed Democrats, who love our country and feel the DNC needs to stand for truth, care about its voter base and stop committing actions worse than what we only thought possible of the worst Republicans. The DNC and the Obama Campaign need to be held accountable for the catastrophe of the 2008 Democratic Primary. We must right their wrongs...after all, this is America, the Land of the Free, where every American has the right to a fair, honest voting process, and to have his or her vote counted...

We Will Not Be Silenced

On March 4, 2008, the Clinton campaign began sounding the vote fraud alarm, writing in part:

The campaign legal hotline has been flooded with calls containing specific accusations of irregularities and voter intimidation against the Obama campaign. This activity is undemocratic, probably illegal, and reflects a wanton disregard for the caucus process.

The three most egregious categories are:

1) Irregularities: Prematurely Taking Precinct Convention Packets by Obama Campaign

Numerous calls have shown that Obama supporters prematurely removed convention packets from polling places. Packets may not legally given out until 7:15 PM or when the last voter has cast a ballot in the primary. The Texas State Party warned the Obama campaign in writing that they may not take these packets early or remove them from the polling locations. The Party directed that these irregularities be reported to law enforcement “since they amount to criminal violations.” The Party stated “removing convention packets . . . will not be tolerated...

2) Voter Intimidation: Lock-out of Clinton caucus goers by Obama Campaign

Numerous calls have been received that the Obama campaign has taken over caucus sites and locked the doors, excluding Clinton campaign supporters from participating in the caucus. The Clinton supporters have been unable to enter the premises to caucus. In at least one instance, law enforcement was called and forcibly opened the caucus site.

3. There are numerous instances of Obama supporters filing out precinct convention sign-in sheets during the day and submitting them as completed vote totals at caucus. This is expressly against the rules. The sign-in sheets were copied by the Obama campaign from the Texas Democratic Party website and taken by supporters to various polling places to sign-up caucus goers prior to the start of the caucuses

A 2008 post on MyDD describes what one caucus official saw:

I was a volunteer field organizer in El Paso, Texas and investigated irregularities for three weeks after the election.

As a Democratic Coordinated Campaign Regional Director in 1996 and as a volunteer on campaigns in the 1990s, I have the ethical obligation to report what I saw in Texas.

When California 22nd CD Republican candidate Tom Bordonaro famously tried to suppress the vote by phone banking under a false name, many of us in the Capps campaign immediately said that we would walk away from a campaign if our side were similarly unethical. That moment kept replaying through my head election night in El Paso. Simply put, the Obama campaign made Tom Bordonaro look ethical.

Lois Capps is correct when she wrote that Sen. Obama is inspiring. However, many of the actions of his campaign that I witnessed and investigated are criminal.

I know this information is jarring, and puts DNC delegates in an uncomfortable situation, but if the time comes for delegates to endorse or get behind a consensus candidate, this information should be available. As I wrote to Rep. Capps, I apologize for not illuminating this earlier.

My observations in Texas were that caucuses were broadly illegitimate. In a few well-run counties, Hillary's caucus vote was the same or better than the popular vote, but in chaotic counties, she fell behind by double digits. While Texas is the only state to have both a binding popular vote and a caucus vote, we saw similar results in Washington State, where Obama's numbers plunged in the unofficial primary compared to the caucuses .

This stands out: only four major Texas counties were orderly enough to report most of their caucus results election night, and in three of these, caucus preference mirrored the popular vote (HRC popular/caucus): El Paso (69/75), Austin/Travis (37/34), San Antonio/Bexar (56/57). In the case of Austin, I have read reports that that both sides ran their caucuses well.

These counties had exceptional organizations, but it should not take heroics to run a fair election.

On election night in El Paso, it became obvious that the Obama field campaign was designed to steal caucuses. Prior to that, it was impossible for me to imagine the level of attempted fraud and disruption we would see...

We saw stolen precincts where Obama organizers fabricated counts, made false entries on sign-in sheets, suppressed delegate counts, and suppressed caucus voters. We saw patterns such as missing electronic access code sheets and precinct packets taken before the legal time, like elsewhere in the state. Obama volunteers illegally took convention materials state-wide, with attempts as early as 6:30 am. Some of this was presented in a press release from Clinton Campaign Counsel Lyn Utrecht, but I witnessed worse than what she disclosed.

In one example of fraud that I witnessed, one of my precinct captains, an elderly Hispanic woman, called me to report that BHO supporters had illegally seized control of the convention. During our series of phone calls, Mrs. "A." reported that the Obama people took the convention materials and did not have a legal election of officers. Like nearly all of El Paso, BHO people would have lost such an election in this majority-Hillary, Hispanic, mostly elderly precinct convention.

The Obama people ordered Mrs. A. to sit across the room during the delegate calculation, and excluded Hillary supporters from the process. Mrs. A. overheard an Obama supporter call in a false delegate count to Austin. In a 13 delegate precinct where Obama should have won approximately 4 delegates, the Obama supporters attempted to award 19 delegates to Obama. This was not innocent. During my attempts at cell phone diplomacy, the Obama "chair" hung up on me, and refused to talk to the ethical Obama organizer I was paired with at another precinct convention. As with all major attempts at fraud that we identified, this delegate count was rectified in private at the county TDP headquarters, according to TDP rules, but there were no public charges or sanctions. It is my opinion that people should be in jail, but there is not a mechanism for this sort of prosecution, certainly not within TDP rules.

Although I have only volunteered in one state, virtually every Clinton staffer I have talked to has similar stories from other caucus states. While the Hillary field campaign operates and feels very much like typical Democratic campaigns, the Obama campaign is something new to Democratic politics...

Ironically, only in very well-organized areas like El Paso were we able to even identify the scale of the attempted irregularities. In these areas, we were also able to rebuff most attempts at fraud, correct fraudulent delegate counts, and protect our voters. In less well-organized areas, we did not have enough eyes and ears to identify or stop fraud, and our numbers plunged.

Although affidavits have not been made public, I have copies and records of the voter complaints for which I did interviews. Although the Hillary campaign has not gone public with evidence of fraud, the national legal team has approximately 200 such affidavits and 2000 voter complaints. The campaign intends to win the popular vote without airing these charges in public, but I suspect the campaign will provide authorities with this evidence upon request.

My own sense is that this information should not be withheld from delegates, since it both casts the Obama campaign as stunningly unethical, and it severely undermines the general credibility of caucuses. It also points out that perception and reality are upside down. The campaign that will "do anything to win," including the illegal acts documented in affidavits, is not Hillary's.

...I am positive that any Democrat who witnessed what I did would stand against Sen. Obama now, and I have faith that some endorsements like Rep. Capps's are temporary. This is wrenching for a Democratic activist like me who has served on county and Assembly District committees, but I cannot support a candidate with a criminal campaign.

Expect Eric Holder to investigate these "irregularities" in 3 - 2 - never.

IT'S NOVEMBER OR NEVER.

I read this in the comments on Don Surber's blog...

If a Patriot doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a Liberal doesn’t like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a Patriot is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat.
If a Liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a Patriot is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a Liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a Patriot is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
If a Liberal is down-and-out, he wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a Patriot doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.
If a Liberal doesn’t like a talk show host, he demands they be shut down.

If a Patriot is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.
If a Liberal is a non-believer, he wants any mention of God and religion silenced.

If a Patriot decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
If a Liberal decides he needs health care, he demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a Patriot reads this, he’ll Share it so his friends know how to vote in November!
If a Liberal reads this, he’ll cuss you from here to Sunday then blame it on Bush.

I'll sing it one last time for you
Then we really have to go
You've been the only thing that's right
In all I've done

And I can barely look at you
But every single time I do
I know we'll make it anywhere
Away from here

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Louder louder
And we'll run for our lives
I can hardly speak I understand
Why you can't raise your voice to say

To think I might not see those eyes
Makes it so hard not to cry
And as we say our long goodbye
I nearly do

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Louder louder
And we'll run for our lives
I can hardly speak I understand
Why you can't raise your voice to say

Slower slower
We don't have time for that
All I want is to find an easier way
To get out of our little heads

Have heart my dear
We're bound to be afraid
Even if it's just for a few days
Making up for all this mess

Light up, light up
As if you have a choice
Even if you cannot hear my voice
I'll be right beside you dear

Yes, I know it's been a while. I was out of town and had limited access to a computer. Since I just came back today, I'm a bit too tired to write anything original. But I did want to share with you an article I read over the weekend about Elana Kagan. I think it's very important to read this and understand who this woman is:

Is Elena Kagan Morally Blind? (American Thinker)
By James Lewis

Elena Kagan has now admitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that as a Clinton lawyer in 1997, she fraudulently revised an official medical opinion by the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The medical society was going to publicly reveal that "its panel of experts found no circumstances in which the (partial birth abortion) procedure was the only option for saving the life of the woman."

In a secret internal memo, she wrote that "This, of course, would be a disaster[.]"

Kagan therefore secretly revised the language so the final statement in 1997 claimed that the partial-birth abortion "may be the best and most appropriate procedure in particular circumstances to save the life or preserve the health of the woman."

That was a pernicious lie. The medical panel originally said that was false. Kagan substituted her own judgment for a medical consensus.

No wonder eight hundred Jewish rabbis have publicly stated that in their opinion, Elena Kagan is not morally qualified to be on the Supreme Court. Her fraudulent actions in 1997 legally authorized the killing of approximately two thousand newborns or almost-newborns each year, according to the pro-abortion Gutmacher Institute.

Partial birth abortion means killing a full-term fetus, a human being. That is murder by biological definition. The media try to throw dust in our eyes about that fact, but most Americans know. We might have mixed feelings about abortion in the first month of pregnancy, but a full-term baby is a human being, and whether it is killed ten minutes before or after delivery makes no difference. It's still the same baby.

What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" don't liberals understand? These are the most compassionate people in the world, remember? Elena Kagan doesn't seem to get the biological reality of babies who are identical to newborns but still living in the womb. She seems to be so stuck that she cannot see reality.

In 2003, the Republicans passed a ban on partial birth abortion, later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. That lead has now been followed by a number of states. But a recent medical article on the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act claims that the law only forced abortion doctors to kill fetuses in the womb. That's not "partial birth," get it? You can do anything to a baby in the womb, no matter how developed it might be. These "abortion providers" are publicly boasting that they are getting around the law by killing near-term babies in the womb. It is astonishing what ideological blindness will do to people.

I know Miss Kagan is Jewish by heritage, but that only makes her more painful to watch. Of all the people in the world, the Jews, whose babies and toddlers were taken away to be killed by the Nazis, should be hypersensitive to this question. Dr. Kagan is a woman, and we think women are especially sensitive to babies. And yet, in a once-in-a-lifetime moment of decision in 1997, Kagan failed to stand for the most basic protection of innocent life.

Elena Kagan has some terrifying opinions about the government's ability to kill free speech. At Harvard she was part of the feminist establishment that got Larry Summers fired as president for dropping a politically incorrect remark. Kagan is no defender of free speech, not even on university campuses where telling the truth is the essence of scholarship. Just the opposite. We have censorship on our campuses today because of the likes of Dean Kagan.

In front of the Judiciary Committee she's been clowning it up. But I don't think Kagan is a funny lady. No, when I look at her, I look at a commissar of Political Correctness, who rose to the top at Harvard Law in the New Age of PC. Stalin's Commissars also made sure the right people died in Siberia and Lublyanka.

We know that premature babies born in the third trimester respond to touch, pain, cuddling, and baby talk. Many biomedical articles in peer-reviewed journals support that claim. Others dispute it, but when there is honest disagreement, we should follow the ancient medical rule: First, Do No Harm!

The brain waves of third-trimester fetuses show that they go through sleeping, dreaming, and waking. The closer they grow to term, the more they are just like any other baby. And then you kill them at the moment of birth -- not in a desperate bid to save the life of the mother, but because it's not convenient to raise a Down Syndrome child? And then we don't even mandate general anesthesia for the baby, the way we do for convicted killers on death row?

Is this the person we want on the Supreme Court?

James A. Lewis is a senior fellow at Center for Strategic and International Studies and directs its Technology and Public Policy Program.