CPAC 2010 Day 3

Like any good conference, CPAC builds up to the the last day. The first speaker of the morning is Rick Santorum, beloved of social conservatives, hated by the left. After Santorum is Andrew Breitbart, scourge of Hollywood and ACORN. Then comes a panel with Jonah Goldberg and so on from there.

Last year Matt and I commuted from our friend Michele's place every day of the conference. I had pneumonia at the time and waking up early enough to make it to the conference (and keeping the late hours that we did) just about killed me. The combination of no pneumonia and staying on site has made for a much more pleasant experience. Even at that, we're all still tired.

Per usual, I'll update the blog throughout the day, but for the up-to-the-minute, blow-by-blow stuff, follow the various twitter feeds here, here, here, & here.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Obama & Acorn: A Winning Partnership

My liberal friends always used to defend President Obama's vast executive experience as a community organizer by saying that, well, "Jesus was a community organizer." Ok.

Whatever you think of that characterization, it's true, you know, that Jesus preached to the sinners--harlots and, presumably, pimps, among them.

If I recall correctly, however, he did not offer to help them with tax evasion, fraud, & underage sex trafficking.

Change you can believe in: A new brand of community organizin'.

via Ace, per usual.

[Yes, I understand that President Obama is not ACORN. They're just "giving input" and helping "shape" his agenda.]

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Acorn: Waaaaaaaay Better Than President Bush's "Faith Based Initiatives"

You know, if you like drugs, prostitution, sex trafficking & whatnot.

Oh, and fraud. I almost forgot about fraud. If you like fraud, you're gonna love Acorn.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Cramer, Obama, Liberals, &c.

Ever since I first noticed the phenomenon, I've looked for the right opportunity to put it into practice. What might it be, you ask? Why, quoting myself, of course.

It was prompted by an email I received from Matt P. Given that I hadn't heard from him in awhile, I jumped at the chance.

Matt wrote:

So low taxes are good in bad economic times so people can get rich, but when the economy is good we can soak the rich and damn the poor? I can't understand how he can't see the fault in his logic. Even when he's right, he's still wrong.

From his post yesterday:

"To be totally out of the closet, I actually embrace every part of Obama's agenda, right down to the increase on personal taxes and the mortgage deduction. I am a fierce environmentalist who has donated multiple acres to the state of New Jersey to keep forever wild. I believe in cap and trade. I favor playing hardball with drug companies that hold up the U.S. government with me-too products.

"... I believe his agenda is crushing nest eggs around the nation in loud ways, like the decline in the averages, and in soft but dangerous ways, like in the annuities that can't be paid and the insurance benefits that will be challenging to deliver on.

"So I will fight the fight against that agenda. I will stand up for what I believe and for what I have always believed: Every person has a right to be rich in this country and I want to help them get there. And when they get there, if times are good, we can have them give back or pay higher taxes. Until they get there, I don't want them shackled or scared or paralyzed. That's what I see now."

I'm all for "giving back," but shouldn't that be my choice?

To which I responded as follows:

Cramer is a liberal Democrat & an idiot [ed. note: but I repeated myself]. I guess, from him, we should be glad when he criticizes Obama at all, as he has done recently.

Obviously, I am in wholehearted agreement with what you say.

To liberals, your money is not really your money. It's the money you got by exploiting people, probably, and you don't deserve it. Plus, they know how to use it better than you do. It's all about power & control--that's the conservative vs. liberal argument at it's core:

Conservatives want everyone to have as much control over their lives as possible. They understand that some people are going to screw up, and that sucks, but that most people will do best whatever makes them happy.

Liberals want to control everyone's lives in every possible way because they think they know how to make everyone equally happy, or, as happens to be the case back in a little place I like to call reality, they know how to make everyone's life suck equally (except, of course, for the American version of the Politburo and their friends who get the green dacha's* in the countryside.)

This is the new reality: In a country where market forces aren't left to themselves to pick winners and losers; in a country where trillion dollar budgets and spenduli are used to shower billions of dollars on campaign supporters (read: ACORN, Unions, etc.); in a country where government picks the winners and the losers, you better hope that, at the very least, you aren't on Obama's naughty list.


*In Soviet Russia, supposedly everyone had access to homes in the countryside surrounding Moscow & other Russian cities. In reality, the only ones who stayed there, ate black market food, owned cars that ran, took hot showers, etc., etc. were the leading Communist party members & their friends.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Bi-Partisanship Is Overrated

Early Monday morning I finished Dickens' Great Expectations. I was interested to see that he used the term "overrated."

Apparently it's a term that's been percolating for longer than Barack Obama's political career.

My bad.

Today I received an email from Matt P. I hadn't heard from Matt P. for a long time so I was glad to read what he had to say about the Spendulous bill currently being considered in House/Senate conference.

Here's Matt P.:

Your most recent blog post mentioning our new "post-partisan" era made me think of an email I received from my quite liber... err... very liberal uncle recently. He asked "Why... is the majority party permitting the bankrupt policies of the elephant party to dominate so much of the discussion surrounding the stimulus package? They don't seem to value bipartisanship, why should the Democrats?"

To me the answer is quite clear, even when accepting the premise that Democrats are not partisan and that the minority party had a huge say in anything that happened with this stymie-ulus bill. My answer, in part:

"From a purely political standpoint, if this can be portrayed as a bipartisan effort, it can be claimed as such, which would drastically reduce the overall risks of such a bill failing while maintaining the positive political upside if it were to succeed. "If we hadn't reached out the Republicans, this wouldn't have failed." Or, "If we had reached out [to] the Republicans more, this stimulus would not have been as effective."

From an ideological standpoint, I don't think that either party should place such high value [on] bipartisanship as it's much over-hyped in its importance. If you truly believe in something, you should make every reasonable effort to bring it about, especially on something as important as this. It's about making sure that the application of principle does not pull you away from that core belief. If you believe that this is our economic armageddon and the only way to avoid that is to either borrow the money or make nearly a trillion dollars out of thin air, then bipartisanship is a non-issue."

That being said, I can't stand this thing for a host of reasons, but I don't have the time to go into that.

The Spendulous was always going to pass. Regardless of its particular impact if/when it comes to pass, the economy will, eventually, recover. Democrats can then claim (in a partisan, rather than post-partisan or bi-partisan way) to have effected the recovery by passing out free condoms and building dog parks and whatnot.

They just have to hope that things are looking better in 2010. Sure, they will still be able to blame Bush, but they will be less able to. Additionally, you should not conflate Obama's popularity (now off its historic high) with the Democratic Congress'. Throughout this process, Obama has cleverly positioned himself to be able to cast off the Democratic detritas (read: Reid & Pelosi).

If something bad happens, it's because they didn't pass the bill he wanted. He'll say, 'I signed it because it was the best I could expect from those idiots.'

Incidentally, I wouldn't disagree with his characterization of Pelosi & Reid.

2012 will roll around and by then all the money he will have paid out to unions and ACORN will have filled their ranks with the real-employment-averse, but Obama-politically active, recent college graduates. This modern-day force of Obama brown-shirts will then, by hook or crook, get their man elected, again. Folks, his election team is working in the off-season.

The Spendulous is about fulfilling every liberal's spending dream of utopia and of creating a perpetual Obama machine.

It's like the water cycle we learned about back in elementary school: Vote Democrat, Democrats pass trillion dollar bill with billions of dollars for unions and "community re-organizing" groups who then contribute money and manpower to re-elect their Democratic patrons.

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with this cycle is that eventually you run out of other people's money to spend.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

More Examples Of Voter Fraud

Dateline Dixville Notch, New Hampshire:

Democrat Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch, N.H., where the nation's first Election Day votes were cast and counted early Tuesday.

Obama defeated John McCain 15-6. Independent Ralph Nader was also on the ballot, but received no votes.

The first voter, following tradition established in 1948, was picked ahead of the midnight voting and the rest of the town's 19 registered voters followed suit in Tuesday's first minutes.

Town Clerk Rick Erwin says the northern New Hampshire town is proud of its tradition, but says the most important thing is that the turnout represents 100 percent vote.

19 registered voters, but somehow Obama defeated McCain 15-6? Huh?

They can't even stop voter fraud in a ward with just 19 registered voters.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Voter Fraud (UPDATED)

A few years ago, someone I know voted more than once at BYU's Battle of the Bands competition. This person's friend was in the running and was, going into the comp, one of the top 2 or 3 bands. As it turned out, the band won the competition by less than the number of additional, fraudulent, votes made by the friend-of-the-band.

That's bad.

But it's also just another stupid battle of the bands competition at one of thousands of universities across the country. It didn't have anything to do with the single most important office on the face of the earth.

In the name of, something, liberal "community organizing" groups like ACORN sign up literally tens of thousands of imaginary voters in order to create as much confusion as possible surrounding the actual vote. Why? So they can push through as many fraudulent votes as they possibly can, so they can game the system the way the 'friend-of-the-band' did at BYU and make sure their "friend," Barack Obama, wins.

It's happening in Ohio.

It's happening in Seattle. (it worked the last time around when Chris Gregoire beat Dino Rossi after the 3rd recount and inclusion of literally thousands of additional votes which were "found" after the fact. yeah.)

It's happening in Pennsylvania.

Even ACORN's own internal review shows "irregularities."

A loss in two weeks will be a hell of a lot easier to take if it isn't a result of Democratic litigation and the inclusion of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ACORN votes.

Remember: Wanting your guy to win does not justify breaking the law, gaming the system, and negating legitimate voters' right to elect their leaders.

UPDATE 3:31pm BDT: I almost forgot: They signed up a bunch of convicts in Virginia, too. 


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Barack Obama's Militant Community Organizers

(apologies if you already read this at Drudge)

Even the oldsters are getting into the act. Can any of you see your grandparents doing something like this?

Poll workers from opposing sides in the presidential race apparently clashed in a physical altercation Friday at a Cuyahoga Falls nursing home when one accused the other of improperly marking a ballot.

George Manos, the 75-year-old Republican, told police that Edith Walker, the 73-year-old Democrat, jumped on his back and struck him in the head three to four times with her fists. Manos said two other elections workers had to pull Walker off his back, according to a report filed with Cuyahoga Falls police.

Manos said it happened after he accused Walker of ballot tampering, and he wants to prosecute.

[...]

The alleged assault piqued the interest of Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign — as the voter in question reportedly wanted to vote for McCain but her ballot was initially marked for Sen. Barack Obama.

[...]

The voter was able to cast a new, correct ballot with her desired choices, according to elections board officials.

[...]

Walker said in her statement that Manos tried to grab the ballot in question out of her hand. She said he accused her of marking the ballot wrong and she ''apologized to him if I did do it, but he was very mean to me.''

Manos' written statement is similar to what he told police. He also said Walker initially refused to show him the ballot, then marked it a second time.

Richard Bader, a Republican poll worker at the nursing home, wrote that he forced his way between Walker and Manos and ''she tried to strong-arm me out of the way, but I held my ground.'' Bader said the incident drew a crowd of six to 10 people.

Robert Dengle, a Democratic poll worker who witnessed the incident, wrote that Manos grabbed the ballot out of Walker's hand and she went after him to get it back. When they ultimately reviewed the ballot, he said, it was marked both for Obama and McCain.

It's pretty clear what happened here. Walker was marking a ballot for another lady, purposely mis-marked it for Barack Obama, Manos noticed it, presumably told her to correct it, she wouldn't, but finally marked it a second time--this time for John McCain, as she knew she should have in the first place--at which point Manos took the ballot from her and she attacked him, and then attacked the other worker who tried to intervene.

No big deal, right? Unless you see this as early, anecdotal evidence, of how Obama's "in their face, arguing" tactics will play out across the country as election day nears. That's how I see it. Democrats don't care about the threat of voter fraud.

They'd let everybody vote: fake people, dead people, illegal immigrants, etc.

It's why they have felons voting in Seattle and 200,000 shady voter registrations in Ohio alone. Of course, the latter is the work of ACORN. No surprise there. And no one pauses to consider why it is the Obama camp thinks felons will vote for their guy.

The same thing is happening across the country.

By hook or crook. That's how they have always done it in Chicago. And Obama learned it well as a community organizer working for ACORN. Now the strategy has been exported to his "campaign workers" (read: militant, discontented hipsters) across the country.

Remember how Democrats screamed about the "stolen" election in Florida in 2000? Watch as they try to "community organize" their way to a win over the next 19 or so days.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

ACORN's 'Imaginary' Voters

Can you imagine if some conservative group had registered voters somewhere and a quarter of them turned out to be dead, Disney characters, or the Dallas Cowboys? We would not hear the end of it in the MSM and the rage (more than usual) among the nutroots would rock the very foundations of the internet, such as they are.

Meanwhile in the conservative blogosphere, we have the satirical responses of Iowhawk. Thank the powers that be for Iowahawk or I would not be able to keep my sanity, such as it is.

ST. LOUIS - Attorneys for the voting registration organizations ACORN and Project Vote filed an anti-discrimination voting rights suit in the U.S. Federal District court this morning, alleging the United States government is involved in "a widespread, systematic effort to disenfranchise Imaginary-Americans and deprive them of access to polls."

"Participation in our electoral process is a fundamental right, and the foundation of our democracy," said ASDF ASDFG, a spokesperson for the National Association for the Advancement of Imaginary People, one of the groups named as plaintiffs in the class action. "We will not be silent when government denies people access to the polls on the basis of color, or sex, or existential status."

The new suit was prompted by on a series of law enforcement raids of ACORN offices in 10 states over the past week, as well as a reported Justice Department investigation. Federal and state officials say they were acting on tips of fraudulent voter registration forms, after election officials reported a flood of unusual applications submitted by ACORN canvassers. In Las Vegas the Clarke County election commission reported thousands of registrations signed by the Dallas Cowboys, while in St. Louis officials discovered thousands of others signed by Power Rangers, Menudo, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In Cleveland, Ohio Republican officials complained to the Federal Election Commission after early-voting sites barred observers when thousands of Invisible-Ohioans arrived at the polls aboard hundreds of invisible ACORN buses. In Ida Grove, Iowa, Ida County Registrar Debby Ballard expressed concern when a convoy of Chicago ACORN semis submitted 4,000,000 provisional ballots, 17 seconds before a 5 pm deadline.

This is democracy: making sure everyone gets to vote (several times; in multiple locations; even if they're dead; even if they're felons; even if they're not legal residents; even if they're made up; so long as they are for Obama).

You know, this is the type of ballot-box stuffing that kept Saddam Hussein in power all those years (and keeps Hugo Chavez in power).


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.