Syndicated

In the meantime, Obama says McCain is “devil you know”, but
Obama just unknown

The Messiah thing just doesn’t let up.
Ben Smith has Nancy Pelosi describing Barack Obama as “a leader
that God has blessed us with at this time.”

Maybe he is the one?

In the meantime,
Obama says that McCain is “the devil” but that Obama is merely
“unknown”:

“Even when people are having a tough time, sometimes
the devil you know may be preferable to the unknown.”

Of course, it is a joking point. But it is still telling that he
can only quote the saying so far to call McCain a devil, but
himself only unknown.

Emil Jones said it was “steak”, “not pork”

Barack Obama’s mentor, Emil Jones, will announce his resignation
from the Illinois State Senate today, according to the
Chicago Tribune. The Tribune describes Obama as Jones’ protege.

Rumors are floating that Jones is wrapped up in a criminal
investigation. We will keep you updated…
We have written about his own private slush fund in the
past.

In the meantime,
here’s what you need to know about the relationship between
Jones and Obama:

So how has Obama repaid Jones?

Last June, to prove his commitment to government transparency,
Obama released a comprehensive list of his earmark requests for
fiscal year 2008. It comprised more than $300 million in pet
projects for Illinois, including tens of millions for Jones’s
Senate district.

Shortly after Jones became Senate president, I remember asking
his view on pork-barrel spending.

I’ll never forget what he said:

“Some call it pork; I call it steak.”

Paul Pringler of the LA Times has running a great series of stories about the corruption of the LA local of SEIU. The most recent places them all in context.  The basic idea is that the head of LA local, Tyrone Freeman, appears to be using union funds to route money back to his friends, family, and even spouse.

This story adds three important components. First, Freeman appears to run corrupt elections. Second, he is a "protege" of Andy Stern, the head of SEIU, and there is evidence that Stern and the (inter)national organization is covering up for Freeman. And, third, Stern has a strategy for using Freeman and his corrupt elections and embezzling to take over all of the California SEIU. If these facts hold up, it could lead to some very danger places for Stern and the SEIU.

The details from the story are all above the fold. The key point here is that these stories suggest a need to continue these investigations and examine both national and local SEIU expenditures much more closely.

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The basic story is that Tyrone Freeman used funds from the local to pay his family lots and lots of money from the union treasury:

In addition to the outlays to the firms owned by Freeman’s wife and mother-in-law, the union paid a combined $219,000 in 2006 and 2007 to a video firm whose principals include a former employee of Freeman. A now-defunct minor league basketball team coached by Freeman’s brother-in-law received $16,000 for what the union described as public relations, according to records and interviews.

The union also paid about $106,000 to a firm called The Filming, for which no incorporation record, business license, address or telephone listing could be found.

In addition, he appeared to run corrupt elections:

The election of a Los Angeles union leader under fire for his labor group’s spending practices is the subject of a government review that could force a new vote because of complaints that the contest was unfair to challengers.

The U.S. Labor Department is investigating allegations that Tyrone Freeman’s union local made it nearly impossible for candidates not on his slate to qualify for the ballot, according to people familiar with the probe.

These are neat and good stories for demonstrating union corruption and why unions shouldn’t have more power over the votes to unionize by giving them card-check.

But the real story is that this crook, Tyrone Freeman, is a central part of Andy Stern’s plan to centralize power:

Trossman’s efforts succeeded, the source said. Freeman’s local continued to expand as part of SEIU President Andy Stern’s much-celebrated campaign to organize entire industries state by state. The local and an affiliate ended up representing about 190,000 workers, most of them in the field of home healthcare. …

Lichtenstein said the union clearly had an "investment" in Freeman, a Stern protege who has been a high-profile loyalist in the SEIU push to consolidate regional locals into statewide chapters. That effort is being resisted by a handful of dissidents, notably the president of a 150,000-worker Oakland affiliate.

Not only is Stern trying to give this guy Freeman power, but Stern appears to be covering up for him:

In response to the July inquiries, Trossman had issued a statement on behalf of Stern that said the union had received no allegations about Freeman’s local. Freeman denied any wrongdoing.

The source, who said he was party to internal conversations about Freeman in 2002, told The Times last week: "The international knew that there were allegations of impropriety many years ago. This is not news to them."

Picking a fight with NRLC on a question of fact

I watched Rick Warren’s Saddleback event last night. I thought
it was interesting. I thought John McCain won, an opening shared by

Zack
Exley, a former John Kerry staffer. He called Obama’s
performance “disappointing” and notes that he had been coached on a
number of issues by evangelical leaders but that Obama “kind of
went around in circles”, calling it “a little John Kerryesque”.

By contrast, he describes McCain as:

Wow. McCain is doing really well. He’s so relaxed and natural.
What’s going on? He was supposed to be old and spent and out of
touch. But he’s being so much more engaging than Obama was. I
think… Right?

But, in some circles, the news of the night may be different.
Just minutes after leaving the stage, Obama gives an interview with
CBN’s David Brody. Brody drills down on the
Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which we have discussed here. The
key passage:

Brody: Real quick, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I gotta
tell you that’s the one thing I get a lot of emails about and it’s
just not just from Evangelicals, it about Catholics, Protestants,
main — they’re trying to understand it because there was some
literature put out by the National Right to Life Committee. And
they’re basically saying they felt like you misrepresented your
position on that bill.

Obama: Let me clarify this right now.

Brody: Because it’s getting a lot of play.

Obama: Well and because they have not been telling the
truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a
situation where folks are lying. I have said repeatedly that I
would have been completely in, fully in support of the federal bill
that everybody supported – which was to say –that you should
provide assistance to any infant that was born – even if it was as
a consequence of an induced abortion. That was not the bill that
was presented at the state level. What that bill also was doing was
trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade. By the way, we also had
a bill, a law already in place in Illinois that insured life saving
treatment was given to infants.

When a group like the National Right to Life Committee is called
out as liars by the candidate himself, the group responds and the
issue is elevated. Obama has now given editors reason to print
these stories.

By the way, the best details on this issue are, to my knowledge,
in
David Freddoso’s book, The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely
Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite
Candidate

This will be an interesting fight to watch. If NRLC and Freddoso
are right, Obama just lied on video to the Christian Broadcasting
Network. That’s a story.

At the end of June, Barack Obama had $72m CoH. At the end of July, he had $65.8m CoH, after raising $51m.

That means he spent $57m. Can he sustain this level of fundraising? And how do you spend that much money in a month?

How many commitments does he have to break?

The
LA times has exposed a nice little bit of hypocrisy from Barack
Obama’s campaign. His campaign is now directly soliciting
high-six-figure checks from unions:

In an example of the campaign’s late-innings effort, a very
senior Obama campaign official called the political director of one
of the largest labor unions about two weeks ago and asked for a
$500,000 contribution on top of a similar amount that had been
committed just a few weeks before, according to the union
official.

The campaign, further more, refuses to deny whether Obama is
doing it directly:

A spokesman for the campaign, Hari Sevugan, declined to say
whether Obama himself had become involved in these fundraising
efforts or to confirm any details of work done by others from the
campaign.

Now, my problem here isn’t that he is doing it. It is the
hypocrisy of attacking it and then doing and claiming that he is
clean. This “say Mister Clean, do Mr. Washington” pattern is
the pattern of his campaign. Read on for
details.

First he says that he will take public financing. Then he
doesn’t. His argument is that he gets most of his money from small
donors. It’s not true, as noted by Open
Secrets.

In the primary, he attacked outside groups for attacking him,
but thought it was fine that they attacked Obama. He also invoked
Republican outside groups — and there are none this year — when
he dropped out of public financing. At the same time, AFL-CIO is
dropping $54m, and just last week the
the Obama campaign started sending signals to outside groups
that they should turn it on.

Indeed, as a comical exercise, just
google “obama outside groups”. Here’s what you get:

• 
  Obama Aide Warns Against “Shadowy Outside Groups” in Fundraising
  Pitch

• Outside
  Groups Aid Obama, Their Vocal Critic

• Obama: Don’t
  Fund the Outside Groups

• 
  Obama favorite of outside groups

• 
  Source: Obama To Start Looking The Other Way On 527s

The only “Change I Can Believe In” there is the changing on the
dime for his own political advantage.

John McCain released a technology policy. For the most part, I am not qualified to comment on it, but I appreciate that it is more an "innovation" policy than a "technology" policy.

That said, I am completely shocked by some of the responses from the techno-left on this. They seem to actively desire the government to engage in social engineering through industrial policy. It is terrifying.

I first saw this in Micah Sifry’s tweet yesterday.

to McCain, the net appears to be just an economic engine. A series of tubes, if you will.

I was startled by this when I read it. "Just an economic engine" is not a bad thing to my mind. This thing that is "just an economic engine" has dramatically transformed our lives in a small number of years. But I just thought it was weird. Then I read this at Joho the Blog:

To McCain, the Internet is all about business. It’s about people working and buying stuff. There is nothing — nothing — in his policy statement that acknowledges that maybe the Net is also a new way we citizens are connecting with one another. The phrase “free speech” does not show up in it. The term “democracy” does not show up in it. What’s the opposite of visionary?

The most generous reading of this is unserious technology fetishism. Why should a document about government’s economic levers in encouraging innovation talk about "democracy"? The most alarming reading is that everything we do should be subordinated to technology. But it doesn’t stop there.

Joho later says, "Even if we ignore the cultural, social, and democratic aspects of the Net …" Does he really want government policy to regulate the "cultural, social, and democratic" aspects of anything? Should these be the subject of tax policy? Which government agency? Should we make a new "Federal Cultural and Social Regulatory Agency?"

For real guys. Do you want government guiding the way in the creation of cultural or social practices?

Now, "democracy" is a seperate question. But here, McCain and the RNC have actually put resources and time where the Democrats and Obama have not. There is much more of a mechanism for feedback on the RNC platform. McCain actually uses participatory — as in "Partcipatory Democracy Forum" — frameworks as the default mode of campaigning.  Sure he doesn’t blackberry and SMS with Scarlett Johansen, but so what? And what does that tell us about "democracy"?

On another level, the transformative impact of technology on our lives is occurring precisely because of economics. Lowered transaction and manufacturing costs are allowing interactions and connections that could not happen before. But why have the government drive that? Let’s have the government facilitate the innovation and let everyone drive it.

The Club for Growth just dropped a huge amount of coin in Alaska to help Sean Parnell. $350k for 2 weeks, the largest independent expenditure in a federal race in Alaska history, according to one AK operative. Here’s the ad:

CfG has taken care of the negative. Now go help Sean Parnell with the positive. Give money to Sean Parnell.

When you give money to your spouse, aren’t you giving money to
yourself?

Regular readers will know that I hate corruption, especially by
elected officials and unions. The press seems to love the stories
about the elected officials, but rarely focuses on the unions. The

LA Times breaks the mold:

Advocates for low-wage caregivers called on authorities Monday
to investigate the spending practices of a Los Angeles union and a
related charity that have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to
firms owned by the wife and mother-in-law of the labor
organization’s leader. …

It gets tastier:

In addition, the union last year spent nearly $300,000 on a Four
Seasons Resorts golf tournament, a Beverly Hills cigar club,
restaurants such as Morton’s and a consulting contract with the
William Morris Agency, the Hollywood talent shop, records show.

The union paid a combined $219,000 in 2006 and 2007 to a
video firm whose principals include a former employee of the
local, according to Labor Department filings and
interviews. And a now-defunct minor league basketball team
that Freeman’s brother-in-law coached received $16,000 for what the
union described as public relations.

The local paid about $106,000 to a firm called the
Filming, for which no incorporation record, business license,
address or telephone listing could be found.

And:

The Times reported Saturday that the payments to the company
owned by Freeman’s wife, Pilar Planells, were among the local’s
largest single expenses last year, at about $178,000. Planells has
said she did not personally profit.

With all that money, no wonder they could afford
such a swank destination wedding.

For more, try the
LAT story from the weekend too.

So someone pleads guilty to tring to bribe Mississippi Democratic Senate candidate and former Governor Ronnie Musgrove. The Clarion-Ledger has the details:

Georgia businessman pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy to corruptly influence a public official in connection with Mississippi’s costly and failed beef plant venture — a decision that could spill over into a U.S. Senate race.

Who? Ronnie Musgrove, with $45k to his campaign account:

Robert Moultrie, chairman and chief executive of The Facility Group of Smyrna, Ga., admitted he gave $45,000 in contributions to the re-election campaign of then-Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who is now running for the Senate.

And:

Moultrie has agreed to cooperate with authorities. He first gave Musgrove $20,000 through a PAC Moultrie formed in July 2003. In September 2003, “Musgrove contacted Moultrie for another campaign contribution of $25,000,” according to court documents.

Currently, no one is alleging that Musgrove did anything wrong. Currently.