Barack Obama is not your typical liberal, the guy is a radical:

Can we acknowledge for a minute that a full HALF of this country’s electricity comes from coal power?

I would love to see him lose Pennsylvania because of something like this, and only because it would be because his actual policies are finally being revealed.

Stanley Kurtz, who this year made a name for himself as one of the best investigative journalists left in the business, puts out a final piece on Barack Obama today:

Obama’s troubling associations are more than isolated friendships or instances of bad judgment. His ties to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Pfleger, James Meeks, ACORN, the New Party, and the Gamaliel Foundation all reflect Obama’s sympathy with radical-left ideas and causes — wealth redistribution prominent among them. At both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for example, Obama and Ayers channeled money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN, a militant group pursuing economic redistribution, succeeded in undermining credit standards throughout the banking system, thereby modeling the New Party’s plans to tame capitalism itself. So the association with Ayers is not an outlier issue, but part and parcel of a network of radical ties through which Obama’s supported “major redistributive change.” Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized?

Scary to think about, but important as tomorrow is Election Day.  There isn’t much time left, but here’s some ammo to convince your friends last minute that a vote for Barack Obama is a disaster in the making. 

You may have heard a bit about Barack Obama’s connection with radical palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi.  The latest pushback from the Obama campaign and his fellow travelers in the media is that Khalidi is merely a college professor that Obama worked with at the University of Chicago and Obama’s association with him only shows that Obama is open minded and willing to listen to views on Israel in order to “challenge” his thinking.  That isn’t just wrong, it’s misleading and it’s dangerous.

In today’s Washington Post, the editors bring us this on Khalidi:

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis—or even to Mr. Ayers—is a vile smear.

Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was “deeply flawed” but conceded there were also “flaws in the alternatives.” Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging—as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he “offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

From reading the editorial you’d think that we were the idiots for criticizing Obama’s relationship with Khalidi.  In fact, the Post titled their editorial, “An Idiot Wind,” leaving no doubt what they think of those that criticize this relationship.

Unsurprisingly, the Post leaves out quite a bit of detail about Khalidi’s activities and it is important that the record show just how radical and evil this man truly is.  Thanks go to Rachel Neuwirth at Campus Watch for writing on this topic today:

Rashid Khalidi was the director of the PLO’s press agency WAFA from 1976 to 1982, at a time when the PLO was conducting a massacre of 37 Israeli civilians in a bus on Israel’s coastal road, the brutal murder of a four-year-old Israeli girl in Nahariya, and numerous other terrorist killings of Israeli civilians. The PLO was also waging a brutal war against the Lebanese Christian community during this period, and carried out numerous massacres of Lebanese Christians; the worst of these was the killing of about 500 people in the village of Damour. During this same period, Rashid’s wife Mona Khalidi was an English translator for WAFA. Rashid Khalidi is now an advocate of a “one state solution” for all of “Palestine” - meaning the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab state. Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, in an article in the Washington Times on July 9, 2004, summarized Rashid Khalidi’s views about Israel this way: “[His] extremism comes out when he calls Israel an ‘apartheid system in creation’ and a ‘racist state’ that ‘brainwashed’ Americans do not understand. Jerusalem, with its Jewish majority since the 1880s, he deems ‘an Arab city’ whose control by Israeli ‘foreigners’ is ‘unacceptable.’ And so on.” Khalidi also accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”

In 1995 Rashid and Mona Khalidi co-founded the The Arab-American Action Network, a virulently anti-Israel organization that strongly supports the Palestinian Arab terrorist movement. It regards the creation of the state of Israel as a “naqba” ("catastrophe" in Arabic). Mona Khalidi served as the group’s President from its inception until some time this year, although she is now listed only as a member of its board of directors.

Rashid and Mona Khalidi became close friends of Barack and Michelle Obama during the time when both Barack and Rashid taught at the University of Chicago (1992-2003). At a lavish farewell party for Khalidi in Chicago in 2003, when Khalidi left his prestigious position at the University of Chicago for an even more prestigious one at Columbia University in New York, Obama gave Khalidi a glowing eulogy. He said that he and his wife Michelle had been frequent dinner guests of the Khalidis, and that the Khalidis had frequently babysat for the Obama children. According to a Los Angeles Times account based on a video of Obama’s speech, he added that “his many talks with the Khalidis, . . .had been ‘consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation-a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,’ but around ‘this entire world.’”

Obama’s assistance to the Khalidis, however, went beyond mere kind words at a farewell party. In 2001 and again in 2002, Obama, in his capacity as a member of the board of directors of the Leftist non-profit organization the Woods Fund, voted to give the Arab-American Action Network co-founded by Rashid and Mona, and directed by Mona Khalidi, $75,000 in grants.

Her whole piece is a must read for every Jew and supporter of Israel.  Barack Obama’s relationships with anti-semites and enemies of the State of Israel is not trivial and there is absolutely no reason to believe that his views differ much from those of his “former” allies.  And lets remember, these weren’t casual relationships, the Obama’s were frequent dinner guests of the Khalidis and the Khalidi’s babysat for the Obama’s kids.

I thought this was worth posting, from Andy McCarthy, a colleague of Stanley Kurtz at National Review:

I’d like to be on record about this before Tuesday.  We don’t know what is going to happen.  The polls, if they mean anything, appear to be tightening, and I am still hopeful that Americans will grasp the degree to which our liberty and security would be imperiled by an Obama presidency.  But let’s not kid ourselves.  This is uphill, and even if Obama is beaten, the resulting hand-across-the-aisle McCain administration will almost certainly be working with a Congress of significantly wider Leftist margins.  Things are going to get hard, no matter what happens Tuesday.

So before we lapse into dire straits or merely difficult ones, I want to take a moment to salute our colleague Stanley Kurtz.

As shown yet again today, the work Stanley has done over the last several weeks to educate the country about Sen. Obama — the job the McCain campaign wouldn’t do — has been singularly stellar, and often carried out under very trying circumstances.  Whether Obama wins or not, Stanley has done a tremendous service to the nation.  Months and years from now, if and when the reality of Obama cures the national infatuation with the hope of Obama, people will want to understand what happened and who this guy really is.  They will go back, again and again, to Stanley’s work.  There may end up being a lot of remorse if Obama is elected, but there will be no excuse that we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.

I concur.

Morning’s Joe’s, while often frustrating to watch, does have its high points.  This morning Willy Geist had a very entertaining skit showing him on Manhattan’s Upper West Side trying to find a few McCain supporters.  The result isn’t nearly as nasty as the McCain rally that occured on the UWS a few weeks ago, but was just as predictable:

The only thing that comes to my mind is the old saying, “if everyone’s doing it, you know it’s wrong.”

I’ve noticed lately that there have been many articles giving reasons why McCain might still win...let’s take a look:

John Podhoretz - 10 Reasons Why McCain Might Win

Dan Perrin - The Seven Reasons McCain-Palin Are a Lock to Win

Walter Shapiro - How John McCain Could Still Win

Again, I’m not saying he’s going to win, but don’t let the polls get you down.  They’ve been wrong before. 

There’s a great article in U.S. News and World Report today from James Pethokoukis.  In it, he analyzes why exactly Democrats go after the investor class, and the first line is a classic:

There are at least two pretty effective ways to turn someone into a Republican: (1) get them married with kids and (2) get them to invest in the stock market.

Aside from a funny opener, he makes some very good points:

House Democrats recently invited Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor at the New School of Social Research, to testify before a subcommittee on her idea to eliminate the preferential tax treatment of the popular retirement plans. In place of 401(k) plans, she would have workers transfer their dough into government-created “guaranteed retirement accounts” with a 3 percent real return.

Not only would removing the preferential tax treatment of these vehicles raise investment taxes by $100 billion a year and affect Americans making less than $100,000, it would surely prompt many Americans, already shell-shocked by the market’s recent losses, to flee stocks. All this ignores the fact that there are trillions of dollars in American retirement accounts, and abandoning the higher-returning stock market at a probable bottom is classic financial foolishness. If you believe long term in the American economy, then you have to believe in the stock market. If you don’t, then you have to admit the government won’t be able to afford its promises anyway.

and

Bottom line: All this makes smart political sense for Democrats. See, since the mid-1960s, stock ownership in the United States has risen from 10 percent of households to around 50 percent. And that growing Investor Class, a term coined and popularized by CNBC commentator and host Lawrence Kudlow, has helped nudge America evermore to the right. It sure helped George W. Bush get elected twice to the White House, voting for him by wide margins against John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. And it was those results that have helped ensure Democrats will fight to the death to prevent Social Security from being reimagined into a system of personal and high-return investment accounts. Privatization? Given its potential effect on voting patterns, Uncle Sam might as well send every American household a copy of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose on DVD.

But now if the Democrats control both the White House and Capitol Hill, look for them to move hard in the other direction, from an Ownership Society to a Government Owns It Society that would perhaps nudge America back to the left.

My goodness, we stand on the precipice of a Democratic controlled country that will lead us directly into the dire situation in Europe.  Creating a nanny state that every citizen relies on will degrade and eventually completely remove the innate responsibilities of mankind.  Why fight and fend for ourselves when the government can do it all for us?  I shudder to think of it, but we’re damn close. 

Let’s hope the country chooses wisely. 

If you couldn’t tell, Thomas Sowell does not want Barack Obama to be president.  Luckily for all of us, Mr. Sowell articulates his reasoning as only he can.  In a piece he writes in the National Review today, he turns his attention to what electing Barack Obama means as we stand on the verge of witnessing Iran obtain nuclear weapons:

Economic disasters, however, may pale by comparison with the catastrophe of Iran with nuclear weapons. Glib rhetoric about Iran being “a small country,” as Obama called it, will be a bitter irony for Americans who will have to live in the shadow of a nuclear threat that cannot be deterred, as that of the Soviet Union could be, by the threat of a nuclear counter-attack.

Suicidal fanatics cannot be deterred. If they are willing to die and we are not, then we are at their mercy — and they have no mercy. Moreover, once they get nuclear weapons, that is a situation which cannot be reversed, either in this generation or in generations to come.

Is this the legacy we wish to leave our children and grandchildren, by voting on the basis of style and symbolism, rather than substance?

If Barack Obama thinks that such a catastrophe can be avoided by sitting down and talking with the leaders of Iran, then he is repeating a fallacy that helped bring on World War II.

In a nuclear age, one country does not have to send troops to occupy another country in order to conquer it. A country is conquered if another country can dictate who rules it, as the Mongols once did with Russia, and as Osama bin Laden tried to do when he threatened retaliation against places in the United States that voted for George W. Bush. But he didn’t have nuclear weapons to back up that threat — yet.

...None of this can be prevented by glib talk, but only by character, courage and decisive actions — none of which Barack Obama has ever demonstrated.

Read the whole thing, and convey the message to those you know who are serious about our national security.

At first glance, this video of freshman Senator Barack Obama’s habitual tardiness seems funny:

But there’s something more serious at work here.  As a freshman Senator you would think that some humility would be called for, but this video betrays a complete lack of one.  Then, when combined with the reality that while Barack Obama claims to be fighting for the little guy and wants us all to be willing to sacrifice for the good of all, his brother lives in a hut in Africa with no plumbing and his aunt lives in a Boston slum.  Remember, this man is rich.  He has made millions of dollars the past few years.

We all know the type of people he hangs around with.  We know how dishonest his campaign is every day.

Who is this man?  Are we really about to elect such a man to the highest office in the land?

Mark Steyn, brilliant as usual:

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Mark Steyn is absolutely one of the best in the business in describing the threat the West faces against Islamofascism.