Does America really want a change?

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McCain Blasts Dems For Going After Joe The Plumber


Since the debate, when John McCain made a big Issue of Joe the Plumber, Senator Obama's campaign has been bashing Poor Joe. Investigating his background, going through his personal record, bashing the guy on TV. All Joe did was as the Senator a question ! Well today Senator McCain told Obama to leave Joe alone. “Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks" Way to go Senator McCain!!!

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Another Lawsuit

Honolulu lawsuit filed to open Obama's secret birth records

2008-10-18 05:45:24 -

Andy Martin in Hawaii takes legal action to seek the truth and ferret out the facts about Barack Obama's family history


Honolulu lawsuit filed to open Obama's secret birth records
Obama steadfastly refuses to allow access to official sources
Andy Martin in Hawaii takes legal action to seek the truth and ferret out the facts about Barack Obama's family history
ANDY MARTIN
Executive Editor
ContrarianCommentary.com


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

OBAMA NEMESIS ANDY MARTIN SUES IN HAWAII STATE COURTS TO OPEN BARACK OBAMA'S SECRET
BIRTH RECORDS

'WHY IS BARACK OBAMA OBSTRUCTING ACCESS TO HIS BIRTH RECORDS,' ANDY MARTIN ASKS, 'ALONG WITH OBSTRUCTING ACCESS TO COLLEGE RECORDS AND OTHER ESSENTIAL INFORMATION ABOUT HIS PAST? IS THIS THE KIND OF PRESIDENT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WANT? SOMEONE AFRAID TO TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT HIMSELF? HE'S SCARY.'

(HONOLULU, HI)(October 17, 2008) Obama nemesis and author Andy Martin filed suit in the First Circuit Court in Honolulu today seeking a court order to open Barack Obama's secret birth records.

'One of Obama's most controversial and contentious issues that he has allowed to fester for years is the question of his birth certificate,' says Martin. "Obama has posted at least two versions, maybe more, of a 'certificate' on the Internet.

'I want to see a certified copy issued by the State of Hawaii, not one issued by the State of Obama. Why Obama won't allow direct access to his birth records is beyond me. But the closer we get to discovering the truth about Obama the more we understand why he is terrified of that truth.

'What is Obama hiding? Frankly, after being in Hawaii and conducting our first round of interviews, we think we have a clearer picture of what Obama is concealing, and why. We have more research and interviews to conduct before we can announce our opinions.

'In the meantime, I filed a lawsuit against the State of Hawaii to require the state to open Obama's birth records. The Governor and Director of the Department of Health are named as defendants.

'The case has been docketed as number 08-1-2147-10 and assigned to Circuit Judge Bert Ayabe.

'We will distribute copies of the lawsuit at a Saturday morning news conference, as well as making them available on a limited basis Friday evening upon written request. We will hold the Saturday morning news conference in front of the courthouse to provide additional information.

'Friday evening I will be available by cell phone from Ala Moana Beach Park.

'We will issue a news release later Friday with details of Saturday's news conference.

'The basic question remains: why is Obama trying to hide his life from birth to adulthood from the American people? Interestingly, we think we also know now why he has virtually imprisoned his white grandmother and refuses to allow her to appear in public. Who is the man behind Obama's mask? I think my book ‘Obama: The Man Behind The Mask' is aptly titled.

'Next week, we believe we will be in a position to remove Obama's mask and confront him with the truth about who he is and what he is.

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The Spectator.co.uk


Pinch Yourself

The contrast between, on the one hand, the huge amount of material about Obama’s radical associations that has been published in on-line journals and in a few brave newspapers, and on the other the refusal by big media to address it and to vilify those who do, becomes more astounding by the day. The Obamaniacs are spinning the relationship between Obama and William Ayers, former of Weather Undergound Terrorism Inc, as of no consequence because this was supposedly a chance acquaintance and because the educational project they worked on, the Annenberg Challenge, was a worthy one.

Stanley Kurtz now nails that canard by showing how, through the Annenberg Challenge, Obama and Ayers channelled funds to extremist anti-American Afrocentric ‘educational’ programmes which were a carbon-copy of the world view of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s black racist mentor who, under pressure, Obama was forced to repudiate. These programmes promoted, amongst other radical ideas, the ‘rites of passage’ philosophy which attempted to create a ‘virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world’ in order to ‘counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society.’ One such teacher taught that

‘The submission to Western civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy.’

Kurtz concludes:

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright.

No surprise there, since back in June Kurtz pointed to evidence that Obama shared the black racism of the Trinity United Church of Christ. In this article Obama was reported as rejecting ‘integrationist assimilation’ and wanting to channel black rage more effectively into political organisation. Kurtz dug out a chapter in a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois in which Obama sketched out how radical black churches could be harnessed to help radicalise the black population. As Kurtz wrote:

So it would appear that Obama’s own writings solve the mystery of why he stayed at Trinity for 20 years. Obama’s long-held and decidedly audacious hope has been to spread Wright’s radical spirit by linking it to a viable, left-leaning political program, with Obama himself at the center. The revolutionizing power of a politically awakened black church is not some side issue, or merely a personal matter, but has been the signature theme of Obama’s grand political strategy.

Those few brave souls who do try to enlighten the public about all this come up against the kind of intimidation by Camp Obama charted here by Michael Barone:

Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg's WGN radio program in Chicago. Mr. Kurtz had been researching Mr. Obama's relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago - papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters. Obama fans jammed WGN's phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest e-mails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Mr. Rosenberg's example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

Other Obama supporters have threatened critics with criminal prosecution. In September, St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch and St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce warned citizens that they would bring criminal libel prosecutions against anyone who made statements against Mr. Obama that were ‘false.’ I had been under the impression that the Alien and Sedition Acts had gone out of existence in 1801-'02. Not so, apparently, in metropolitan St. Louis. Similarly, the Obama campaign called for a criminal investigation of the American Issues Project when it ran ads highlighting Mr. Obama's ties to Mr. Ayers.

No such threats, of course, will be made against this new book whose publication is tactfully timed for next year so as not to frighten the horses -- Race Course Against White Supremacy, by none other than William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Meanwhile, it turns out that not only did Obama do favours for convicted Chicago fraudster Tony Rezko, but as this story reports Alexi Giannoulias, who reputedly bankrolled Michael ‘Jaws’ Giorango, a Chicagoan twice convicted of bookmaking and promoting prostitution, became Illinois state treasurer last year after Obama vouched for him, and has now has pledged to raise $100,000 for Obama’s campaign.

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

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The Left's Big Blunder


The disastrously counter-productive strategy of Obama's supporters


Two campaigns are being waged right now for the presidency of the United States. No, I'm not talking about the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign. I'm talking about the real-world campaign and the meta-campaign.

The real-world campaign involves speeches and proposals and facts and scandals and political positions and news events. These details, however, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and have become subsumed by the meta-campaign, which consists of perceptions, polls, reactions, analyses and summations. Until very recently, elections were decided by real-world facts -- but not anymore. Facts and events in and of themselves are no longer important; what's important is how everyone reacts to them. And how do we find out the public's mood concerning this or that incident? Why, the media tells us, that's how.

Or so we've been led to believe.



We're all part of the campaign now. Every single one of us. Our opinions, our actions, are bundled together as a group and used as weapons in the race for the White House. When the media reports on what people think, either through public-opinion polling or reportage about anecdotal incidents, it becomes an endless feedback loop, in which the media's representation of most people's purported thoughts is supposed to influence everyone else's thoughts. And then they take another poll to determine how effective the first poll was in influencing public opinion, and the cycle starts all over again. Since everyone now knows that any public expression of their political opinions might be reported by the media, even the most innocent activity becomes a calculated campaign action. Saying how you intend to vote is not simply an expression of how you intend to vote, but rather a component of the public barometer of how the majority intends to vote, which is then used by the media and the blogs to influence everyone else. Nothing is done in all innocence anymore.

It's no longer a matter of dispute that the mainstream media, overall, very strongly leans to the left. Over 90% of journalists classify themselves politically as "liberal" to varying degrees, and innumerable instances of left-wing bias on the part of the media have been pointed out by bloggers over the years. Yes, a small subset of media outlets are identifiably conservative, but they are vastly outnumbered, both in sheer numbers and in influence, by the liberal media. This fact takes on intense importance in an era when the "news" becomes (as it has become) a subjective matter. Nearly any fact or incident can be "spun" to Obama's benefit.

Obama's supporters and his official campaign have taken great advantage of this felicitous informational landscape -- first, that the meta-campaign trumps reality, and second, that the media is cooperative and complicit. For example, after presidential debates, the leading left-wing blogs always coordinate massive online opinion-poll-stuffing campaigns. After the Palin-Biden vice-presidential debate, the overwhelming consensus on conservative and centrist blogs was that Palin had won handily, and that Biden spoke mostly in a soporific monotone while spewing a continuous stream of easily debunked falsehoods. And yet readers of DailyKos, the Huffington Post, Democratic Underground and dozens of other top left-wing blogs swarmed en masse to vote (often repeatedly) in mainstream online polls about the debate, so that afterward, CNN (among many others) could run headlines that said "57% Think Biden Won Debate," basing their conclusion on the results of the online polls. And once enough of these articles get published, then they themselves become "proof" of the debate's supposed outcome, and before long (often just a matter of hours) it becomes a "fact" no longer up for discussion that Biden won the debate. This fact is then referenced by pundits, and slips into supposedly neutral news stories.

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The illusory quest for conformist decision-making in the 2008 presidential election

Say, for example, that you were an Obama supporter who watched the Vice Presidential debate and felt that Palin had done well and was a more effective debater than Biden -- though not well enough to change your mind about voting for the Obama-Biden ticket. Immediately afterward you encounter an online poll, asking you to vote on who won the debate. What do you do? I suspect that most, if not nearly all, Obama supporters would lie and still vote in the poll that Biden had won the debate, even though they felt that Palin had in fact defeated him. But why do so? As an Obama supporter, you still want your candidate to win, so that every action you take should revolve around only one question: Will this help Obama win? Probably unconsciously, people assume without really thinking about why, that if enough people say Biden won the debate, then a general consensus will be reached that Biden did win the debate, and as a result some vague category of Americans who up until that point had not been Obama supporters will change their allegiances and in reality vote for Obama-Biden on election day.

The Obama campaign itself also takes advantage of the sympathetic media to construct a facade of inevitability. The campaign will stage-manage crowds and dictate camera angles so that Obama is seen to not only have overwhelming numbers of fans but the correct demographic proportion of fans; the campaign will coordinate Obama appearances to coincide with rock concerts or other festivals so they can point to the huge crowds who showed up to watch Obama; and the media plays right along.



McCain supporters often complain about this strategy by the Left, going to great pains to point out the poll stuffing, the deceptive photos, the crowd overestimation, the slanted media coverage, and so forth. But should conservatives be so concerned? I propose that McCain supporters should be GLAD this is happening -- because the Left is in fact making a disastrous strategic blunder.

A substantial portion of the Left's strategy during this campaign is to create the perception that as many people as possible are supporting Obama. They strive to not simply show that he has a lot of supporters (which, obviously, he has), but to purposely inflate or exaggerate the numbers in order to make his support seem larger than it really is. The drive to do this seems almost automatic; it is assumed by Obama's supporters to be the most effective campaign strategy. It's so automatic that they perhaps are no longer even aware that it is a strategy. But why? What purpose is possibly served by this behavior? Has anyone on the Left ever paused, stepped back, and asked, "Wait a minute -- why are we doing this? Are we sure it's the correct course of action?" Doing everything possible to inflate the perceived support of Democratic candidates has become so de rigueur that the Left has long ago forgotten why they're even doing it.

This essay examines the underlying faulty assumptions of this strategy -- and shows why it's not only counter-productive, but could backfire disastrously.

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Who Does the Polling?


A key component of this strategy is an over-reliance on polling, since poll numbers which show Obama apparently in the lead can be used to club undecided voters or McCain supporters into submission. You're all alone. Nobody else thinks like you. Your side is losing. You're out of touch. Change your mind -- join the winning team. But the polls may not reflect what we imagine they reflect.

The actual grunt-work of doing public-opinion polling is a low-paying job that doesn't require much (or any) experience. The people asking the "Who will you vote for?" questions either sit in a room for hours on end making repetitive calls, or walk door-to-door in potentially dodgy neighborhoods -- not particularly high-end work. Who would apply for and accept such a job? Not someone who already has a higher-paying job. Not someone who has experience or skills that would allow them a better career or position. Not someone who is middle-class or middle-aged. Not someone who is wealthy. Generally, I wager, college students, the under-employeed and/or the under-educated make up the majority of people who do the actual rubber-meets-the-road polling of asking the questions and writing down the answers. Though there are no published statistics about the demoographics of pollers themselves, the fact that, for example, The Gallup Poll routinely recruits entry-level call-center employees on college campuses lends support to this supposition. And, anecdotally, when I was a college student I briefly worked for a public-opinion call center doing this exact kind of job, and my fellow pollers were almost all college students or underemployed folks, some of whom only worked a limited number of hours per week so as to still qualify for government benefits.

Now, as we all know, college students (especially these days) are usually at the apex of left-wing sentiment in their lives' political journey. As has been documented extensively, people tend to get more conservative as they get older and acquire more responsibilities. And contemporary college students are almost all being influenced toward leftist ideologies by the liberal atmosphere on most campuses. Some will later grow out of it and slowly shift to the center or right, but while they're in college, they're in the thrall of their doctrinaire professors. The Obama campaign itself brags that they have the under-25 demographic locked up.

Furthermore, chronically underemployed or unemployed people also tend to support left-leaning and populist candidates -- especially candidates like Obama who are promising free health care, more government benefits, job programs in poor areas, and so on. This is not a controversial supposition: it's also been documented extensively that wealthy people tend to support Republicans who promise to lower taxes, and poorer people tend to support Democrats who promise more handouts.

So, I posit that the vast majority of people actually doing the polling are themselves Obama supporters. Not necessarily the CEOs who own the polling companies, but the people actually picking up the phone and making the calls, or walking door-to-door.

This fact has potentially significant implications for the outcomes of polls. Imagine, for a moment, that you were one of the rare McCain supporters in a polling call-center; wouldn't you be a little depressed if person after person you called stated that they were intending to vote for Obama? How could you not be? But what if you were an Obama supporter working in that same call center? Wouldn't you be elated or enthused to hear the votes for Obama piling up? Of course you would. Ah, but pollers are under strict instructions to not reveal their personal opinions to the people they're polling. And I'm sure that most try to follow the rules. But even if you grant that, say, 90% of them manage to maintain complete neutrality, and not let some kind of expectation creep into their voice or attitude, that still leaves 10% who might consciously or unconsciously be slanting the results. And that's all it would take to screw up a poll. Even a 95% honesty rate leaves room for 5% bias in the results, which can be very significant in a close race like this one.

Yet I'm not concerned about the 10% or 5% of pollers who consciously allow their personal opinion to slip into the conversation. I'm concerned about the 90%+ who try to appear impartial. The operative word here is "try" -- because as we learned from an amazing horse (yes, a horse), "trying" isn't good enough.

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The Clever Hans Effect

What in the world does a performing horse from early 20th-century Germany have to do with the 2008 presidential election? As it turns out: everything.

Clever Hans was a horse in turn-of-the-century Germany who was apparently able to perform mathematical calculations and all sorts of intellectual feats. According to the Wikipedia Clever Hans page,
Hans was a horse owned by a Mr. von Osten, who was a high school math teacher, an amateur horse trainer and phrenologist, and something of a mystic. Hans was taught to add, subtract, multiply, divide, work with fractions, tell time, keep track of the calendar, differentiate musical tones, and read, spell, and understand German. Von Osten would ask Hans, "If the eighth day of the month comes on a Tuesday, what is the date of the following Friday?" Hans would answer by tapping his foot. Questions could be asked both orally, and in written form. Von Osten exhibited Hans throughout Germany, and never charged admission.
After a government investigation failed to discover any fraud in Hans' performances, a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst performed a series of tests on Hans and discovered something astonishing. First off, he proved that Hans was not in fact making the calculations, nor did he understand German, but rather was simply responding to body language and other subtle clues provided by his human trainers. Hans indicated his numerical answers by stomping his foot the appropriate number of times. So for example, if you asked Hans what 2 + 3 was, he'd stomp five times -- and then stop. But it turned out Hans only stopped stomping when he noticed that the humans surrounding him (often there was a crowd at his performances) expected or wanted him to stop stomping. By controlling what Hans could and could not see, and by asking questions to which the humans did themselves not know the answers, Pfungst proved that Hans was literally a one-trick pony: he only knew that he was supposed to start stomping when a human spoke to him, and then stop stomping when the humans exhibited relief or happiness or a relaxation of tension (which they did when he reached the right number of stomps).

But during his investigations, Pfungst discovered something even more significant: The Hans performances were not intentionally fraudulent, because the trainer (and the audience) were exhibiting the body language unconsciously. But that was only the half of it: when Pfungst himself asked Hans to solve problems, even when he intentionally tried to suppress his own subtle visual and physical expressions which might indicate when to stop stomping, Hans still was able to pick up on them somehow and give the right answer. Again, according to Wikipedia,
After formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.
...
Pfungst made an extremely significant observation. After he had become adept at giving Hans performances himself, and fully aware of the subtle cues which made them possible, he discovered that he would produce these cues involuntarily regardless of whether he wished to exhibit or suppress them. This gives the phenomenon an importance which could hardly be exaggerated. Its recognition has had a large effect on experimental design and methodology for all experiments whatsoever involving sentient subjects (including humans).

Clever Hans correctly performing mathematical calculations
in a laboratory setting -- still managing to pick up seemingly
imperceptible cues from the unwitting experimenter.
This phenomenon is now called "The Clever Hans Effect": the attitude of questioners can affect respondents' answers even if the questioner is trying to remain neutral. If a horse can notice subtle verbal or visual cues, then a person -- who is much more attuned to human culture and emotions -- can probably notice them even more so (possibly also without even realizing it).

So: What's the connection to the 2008 presidential election? Well, much of the media analysis, and even the strategies of the campaigns themselves, is based on the ongoing poll results indicating voter preferences state-by-state and nationwide. But I suspect that we are observing the Clever Hans Effect on a massive scale, and that the polls are in fact unreliable. Worse than "unreliable," actually: they are inaccurate because to some degree they reflect not the honest feelings of the respondents but rather what the pollers want to hear. Since, as discussed above, most poll-questioners are likely to be Obama supporters, and since the Clever Hans Effect tells us that they likely slant their questions and/or provide subtle clues as to what the "correct" answer is whether or not they're trying to be neutral and fair, the end result is that the poll results end up being tilted in favor of Obama. Pundits and journalists and campign directors are deriving supposed "information" from the poll results, and basing their actions on them -- even though the polls merely reflect (to a certain degree) what the pollsters wanted to hear. To a certain degree, contemporary polling is one vast demonstration of the Clever Hans Effect. And the end result, once again, is exaggerated support for Obama.

Hang on just a minute, you protest. The hitch is in that phrase "to a certain degree." Even if everything you say is true, I find it hard to believe that anyone would lie to a pollster simply because they detected that the poller preferred a certain answer over another. That's a valid challenge. Yes, it would only take 5% or 10% of respondents being swayed this way to throw a poll off, but seriously, would it ever happen in real life? I mean, c'mon, who would tell a pollster that they intended to vote for Obama when in fact they were undecided, or were actually going to vote for McCain? Is anyone that sensitive to social expectations?

I've got two words for you. And those words are "Solomon Asch."

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Conformity and the Asch Experiments


Implicit in the Left's continuous attempts to exaggerate Obama's perceived support is the belief that "a crowd draws a crowd" and that undecided voters will be drawn to the Obama camp if they think "everyone else" is supporting him. But is that an accurate assessment? Is there any evidence that it's true?

Well, actually, yes. There is evidence. Or should I use scare quotes: "evidence." I believe that a series of experiments carried out in the 1950s by social psychologist Solomon Asch were in fact the (now long-forgotten) inspiration for and justification for the current strategy, especially the strategy of online opinion-poll-stuffing after debates and other major news events.

Starting in 1951, Asch, a professor at Swarthmore College, ran a series of unusual experiments to generate a quantitative measurement of the subjective term "conformity." The experiments, which many now consider somewhat unethical and a bit sadistic, went like this:

A volunteer was recruited to participate in a vision test. He was brought to a room with seven other volunteers who were also to take the same test, in a group. Little did the volunteer know, however, that his fellow "volunteers" were all confederates of the experimenter, and the test was not a vision test but a psychological torture session designed to elicit conformist behavior. The experimenter would then unveil a pair of displays, one showing a single black line, and the other showing three black lines of varying lengths. The volunteer is told to simply state which of the three lines most closely matches the length of the single line.

Sounds simple, right? In every instance, the correct answer was quite self-evident, as only one of the lines was even close to the correct length. The volunteer, who was always placed in the second-to-last position, was only allowed to state his answer after he had heard most of the other faux-volunteers give their answers. For the first two rounds, these confederates were instructed to give the obviously correct answer; in each instance, the test subject would then also give the correct answer. But starting on the third round, the confederates, as instructed by Asch, intentionally gave a consistently wrong answer; the goal of the experiment was to see if the volunteer would "break" and also begin to chime in with the wrong answer as well. Most volunteers would resist for a few rounds, but eventually the majority would cave in at least part of the time and give the wrong answers in complete defiance of their own perceptions. Overall, the test subjects gave the wrong answers 36.8% of the time -- an astonishing result.

What would you do if you had the ability to conduct this "experiment" on a vast scale? And if the results of the experiment were not just of academic interest, but affected the real world? What would you do if you had a monopoly on the media, and could affect each individual's perception of how the general public felt? You could take the Asch experiment nationwide. You could deceive every single individual voter into thinking he was all alone in his opinions. And consequently, due to social pressures to conform, they'd change their allegiances. You could use it to win elections.

That's the position in which the Left -- the Obama campaign, its supporters, and the liberal media -- imagine themselves to be. They're trying to use the principle of behaviorial conformity as a weapon in the campaign. But there is a terrible flaw in their plan. The Asch experiment doesn't work unless the test subject is unaware that he is being duped. And I'm telling the subject right now: you're being duped.

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Normative and Informational Conformity


In post-experiment interviews, during which Asch revealed the ruse, the test subjects gave one or the other of two completely different reasons for agreeing with the wrong answers. One personality type said that, although they were fully aware what the correct answer was and that everyone else was giving the wrong answer, they themselves repeated the wrong answer publicly because they "didn't want to go against the grain" or to appear like a freak or an outsider, or be rejected by their peers. This attitude was given the unwieldy moniker "normative conformity", in which "a person publicly accepts the views of a group but privately rejects them." The other personality type doubted their own perceptions, and assumed that if an entire group of people thought Line "C" was the correct answer, then it must in fact be the correct answer, despite the subject's own first impression that it was the wrong answer. This type of person actually changed their opinion based on the group's apparent consensus, and would have answered "C" even if allowed to do so anonymously. This attitude was dubbed "informational conformity," in which "a person accepts the views of the group" as actually valid and adopts them internally.

The seemingly minor and esoteric difference between normative conformity and informational conformity is actually not esoteric at all -- it is the key factor which defines this campaign and this election. Because it all boils down to this: Obama supporters presume that increasing Obama's perceived support will induce informational conformity in the American public. In other words, Obama supporters operate on the assumption that individual McCain supporters or undecided voters will in actuality change their minds about who to vote for if they perceive that a majority of people are supporting Obama. The imagined line of thinking is, "Gee, if so many people like this Obama guy, then my impression of him must be wrong; I trust the group's wisdom more than my own impressions."

I submit that this assumption is a catastrophic blunder. To the extent that there is any conformist behavior being exhibited by McCain supporters and undecided voters, it is much more likely to be normative conformity. In other words, people who are confronted with apparent overwhelming support for Obama may indeed announce that they too support Obama, but do so only in order to avoid ostracism or accusations of racism. Inside, however, they have not changed their minds. On November 4, they will go into that voting booth, and in total privacy and anonymity, they are free to vote for whomever they want, without fear of social condemnation for doing so. And in such a setting, normative conformity disintegrates, because there is no "norm" to conform to when your vote is anonymous.

If the American voting system was like an Asch experiment, in which your individual vote was displayed on an electronic tote board for all to see above your voting booth when you pressed the button for McCain, then, yes, normative conformity would in fact affect the election; but our anonymous-voting system frees people to vote according to their innermost convictions. The one important fact of the Asch experiment is usually glossed over in the descriptions of it: "most" of the subjects who gave the wrong answers did so out of normative conformity: "When they were interviewed after the experiment, most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought 'peculiar.' A few of them said that they really did believe the group's answers were correct."

Another fundamental flaw in the Left's presumption that informational conformity will apply during this election season is that, as revealed in this good summation of the Asch experiment, the pressure to conform drops precipitously if the subject is aware of even a single fellow dissenter. All it takes is one person to shatter the facade of unanimity, and suddenly the number of conformist answers drop from around 33% to around 8%. With more dissenters, it drops even further. This is crucial, because despite the overwhelming left-wing bias in the media, there isn't an impenetrable wall of pro-Obama propaganda.

The Left's blunder is thinking that they have a monopoly on the entire infosphere. Yes, liberal ideologues dominate the media, but they do not hold a monopoly. Dissenting voices can be heard. But more importantly, the mediasphere is not the entirety of the infosphere. There are many alternate sources of information and opinion -- most significant among them being the political blogosphere, which is about evenly divided between Left and Right, and which has grown to be nearly as important as the media itself. All it takes is five minutes online for anyone to discover that they have millions of cohorts who think exactly like they do.

While conservative-leaning media outlets are in the minority, they certainly exist, and if one is so inclined one has a wide variety of conservative blogs/radio programs/TV shows/newspapers/writers from which to chose. And even though such outlets have less access to the "mainstream" of public discourse -- ridiculous rumors that crop up on left-wing blogs are almost immediately picked up and disseminated by mainstream media sources, whereas conservative blogs have to publish a real scoop with solid factual evidence if they want to get any media attention -- there remains a continuously audible undercurrent of dissent. So, while the Left might (unconsciously) imagine they have the ability to pull an Asch on the whole country, the deception fails to work, because there is always a Rush Limbaugh or a Little Green Footballs or a Fox News or a Michael Savage whispering in the subject's ear, "It's all a trick! Don't believe the lies!" And under those conditions, the level of informational conformity would almost certainly drop to near zero.

And there's another reason why the Asch experiment could never work on a nationwide scale. When these experiments were first conducted, the subjects were all male college students, in the 1950s. The pressures to conform during that era and in that social setting were much greater than now. The whole reason Asch was testing for conformity in the first place was that the 1950s were perceived (and are still perceived) as the era of conformity. Yet that era has long passed. Nowadays, everyone wants to be a nonconformist. And even though there remains an innate human urge to conform, and even though despite our illusions of individuality we sometimes end up conforming anyway, in the 21st century people at least think that nonconformity is hip. So that the group psychological dynamic is now likely to be the opposite of what it was half a century ago.

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The Race Card and the Revival of the Bradley Effect


The Bradley Effect, a polling phenomenon which has been discussed extensively in this election, is
a discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in American political campaigns when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.... The Bradley effect refers to an alleged tendency on the part of some voters to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, and yet, on election day, vote for his/her white opponent.
Despite being a well-known phrase, the Bradley Effect is quite often misreported by the media and misunderstood by the public to mean that whites who are racist will refuse to vote for any black candidate yet will lie to pollsters about their intentions for fear of having their racist attitudes exposed. As a result, polls sometimes over-report support for black candidates in elections when they are running against white candidates. But this is a gross misapprehension of what the term means. First of all, the phrase "Bradley Effect" originally only referred to a bare-bones description of what actually happens in such races: White voters tell pollsters they intend to vote for the black candidate, but on election day they either vote for the white candidate or don't vote at all. Left out of this original definition was any notion of why this happened. But over the intervening decades since the effect was first noticed (when black Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to lesser-known white candidate George Deukmajian, despite Bradley apparently having a substantial lead in the polls), additional layers were added to the definition in which the motivation was assumed. The causes are in fact not so clear, and are impossible to study directly. While the media and the general public often assume that the Bradley Effect is caused by actual racism, some astute analysts point out the real cause is more likely to be something much more subtle: That white voters who are in fact not racist will pretend to support a black candidate due to fear of being falsely perceived as racist.

The Bradley Effect seems to have gradually evaporated over the intervening decades since 1982, as black politicians became more commonplace and it was no longer automatically assumed that if you voted against a black candidate you did so only out of racism. That is -- until this election. Until this year, accusing your ideological opponents of racism -- a.k.a. "playing the race card" -- was for a while a taboo strategy, which only served to highlight that your campaign was becoming desperate and had no other valid lines of attack. But as election day 2008 draws near, accusations of racism have escalated exponentially, and now it seems the majority of pro-Obama pundits, journalists and bloggers routinely state as fact that all McCain supporters are racists who refuse to vote for Obama simply because he is black (and not because of his policies). The situation is even more extreme in social interactions in liberal areas, where in casual conversation the race card is played almost continuously. I live in the San Francisco area, in an artsy/intellectual/academic circle, and never once have I heard anyone professing support for McCain. If your boss mocks McCain supporters, if all your co-workers express a desire to for Palin to be raped on national TV, if your family are all Obama volunteers, if the media tries to shame everybody into voting for Obama by stating implicitly and explicitly that only a racist would do otherwise, could you have the nerve to come out of the closet as a McCain voter?

In such an environment, where admitting to disliking Obama in the interpersonal sphere has become the equivalent of social suicide, it seems very likely that the Bradley Effect is not just back, but back with a vengeance. The more that Obama supporters go unchallenged in their blanket accusations of racism against McCain supporters, the less likely anyone will publicly admit to dislike of Obama. Hence, the Bradley Effect is not an artifact of racism, but rather an artifact of false accusations of racism.

So, when the phone rings and the pollster calls -- and your Clever Hans social antennae tell you the pollster is young and liberal and likely an Obama supporter -- would you have the nerve to tell the pollster the truth that you wouldn't vote for Obama in a million years? I mean, they called you; they know your number. They know who you are. Can you be absolutely sure they aren't putting a check mark in the "Racist" box next to your name in some mysterious database?


Polls: Snapshot or self-confirming prophecy?


One odd thing about public-opinion polls is that there's no way to know if they're accurate or not. Except for a poll taken on the very last day of the campaign, when it can be later compared to the actual vote totals, a poll is a self-supporting statement of "fact" that can only be confirmed or disproven by taking yet another poll -- which is just as unreliable as the first one. We do not have access to some secret hyper-accurate invasion of privacy enabling us to peer into voters' hearts to see how they actually intend to vote, and to use that information to assess the accuracy of a poll. So, if a poll is taken a month ahead of time showing a candidate with a five-point lead, and then a month later he in fact wins the election by five points, we have no way of knowing whether or not the poll was simply accurate, or whether it was originally inaccurate, but fed a public perception that the candidate was in the lead, causing many voters to switch allegiances to him out of a desire to "be on the winning team." Do polls reflect reality, or do they create reality?

The entire Democratic strategy in 2008 revolves around the unproven theory that polls do create reality. Otherwise, there would be no point in continuously striving to inflate Obama's perceived public support.

The real question at the end of the day is this: Are people telling pollsters they're supporting Obama due to normative conformity (which is what I suspect) or due to informational conformity (which is what the Left is banking on)? We won't know until November 4. You can lie to a pollster. But you cannot lie to a ballot.

There are other issues which can, and do, seriously affect polling results: what time of day calls are made, how the questions are phrased, how the "internals" (the raw data) are doctored, and so on. (You may be surprised to learn, for example, that the poll numbers you see are rarely if ever the raw totals summarizing the responses of 1,000 people called at random; the percentages of Democrats and Republicans are adjusted to match voter registration rates, totals are fiddled with to include or exclude people who say they are "somewhat likely" or "likely" or "unlikely" to vote, and so on.) But the unreliability of polls overall is a different field of study which others have covered in detail and which is beyond the scope of this essay.

[homedawg]

Bluffing When You Have to Show Your Hand: The Worst Possible Strategy

In the majority of strategy games, the most effective plan is to trick your opponent into underestimating you. The goal is to catch them unawares, to spring an attack when they least expect it. But there are exceptions to this rule: in poker, and sometimes in warfare, the most effective strategy can be the reverse -- to bluff, which means to trick your opponent into overestimating your strength.

There's a catch, however: bluffing only works when the rules of the game allow you to avoid a showdown with your opponent. Imagine, for example, that you were playing a hand of high stakes poker against a skilled opponent. You look at your cards and you see that your hand is not particularly good. Under these circumstances, some professional poker players will bet everything they have, and act confident, in hope of bluffing their opponents into folding. When the opponent folds, there is no final showdown; the player who was bluffing collects the winnings without having to reveal his cards, or, even if he does reveal them, doesn't actually need to have the better hand. The opponents gave up because they couldn't take the pressure. But what if the rules of this particular game of poker were changed so that every hand necessarily ended in a showdown: it was not possible to fold, and no matter how much you bluffed, and how much your opponent feared the strength of your hand, you still have to beat his hand at the end of betting. Under these circumstances, bluffing is not only ineffective, it's absolutely foolish, because you're risking everything on a group of cards that are not likely to win.

Similarly, in ancient warfare, if you could convince your opponent that your army was bigger than it really was, you could possibly trick them into surrendering without a fight -- a fight you might have actually lost if you had gone to battle.

Yet presidential elections are not like poker or siege warfare. There is no way to bluff your way to victory. The McCain campaign can't "fold" or surrender, nor can the actual voting on November 4 be cancelled. No matter how much the Obama supporters inflate their apparent strength, at the end of the day they're going to have prove it's true -- or lose the election. Because of this, bluffing in a presidential election is the worst possible strategy, because all you'll end up achieving is to inspire the opposing camp to fight more desperately, since they'll assume their backs are against the wall. Teddy Roosevelt advised that the best political posture is to "Speak softly and carry a big stick" -- but in 2008 the Democrats are yelling at the top of their lungs and carrying only a medium-sized stick.

In 1968, Richard Nixon did the exact reverse of what the Democrats are now doing. Instead of announcing bombastically that he and the Republicans had complete domination of the media and the electorate, his key campaign slogan was "The Silent Majority." Nixon knew full well that the atmosphere of the times made the Republican prospects looks pretty bleak. Youth culture and the social revolution of the 1960s were at a peak; left-wing ideology was soaring in popularity, a huge demographic of young post-war Baby-Boomers had just reached voting age and were thought to loathe the old-fashioned Republicanism; and the media had long had a serious vendetta against Nixon. Everything seemed aligned to ensure a handy victory for Humphrey and the Democrats. But Nixon sensed that behind the media frenzy about hippies and riots and drugs and revolution, there was, literally, a "silent majority" of staid conservative voters whose voices and viewpoints were being ignored. And all he needed to do was to reassure those voters that they existed across the country, even if the media and popular culture ignored them. And, to everyone's astonishment, Richard Nixon, who was considered by many to be a laughingstock, the last holdout of a pathetic dying breed of old fogeys, managed to pull out a razor-thin victory in what seemed like the most hostile possible social environment.

In 2008 there is no silent majority: there is the silenced majority. The unpolled majority. The media is so pro-Obama that the views and the concerns of McCain supporters are for the most part ignored or, at best, mocked. The goal is to foster disillusionment among them, a sense of isolation. To trick the Republicans into all staying home on election day because "there's no hope of winning." Maybe the Democrats can't avoid a showdown on November 4, but if they can convince enough McCain supporters to individually "fold" and not vote at all, then Obama can carry the day.

One of the sources of our current dilemma is that it's no longer possible to tailor different messages to different audiences. In days gone by, leaders could say one thing to one group, and then something else entirely to another group or to the public at large, in order to serve their political purposes. Yasser Arafat, for example, famously would say something conciliatory about the Israel-Palestinian conflict while speaking English to the international press, and after the reporters had all left to file their stories about what a peace-loving moderate he was, would turn around and give a fiery speech in Arabic to his supporters, calling for the extermination of Israelis. Thus, he pleased both sides, well enough to earn him a Nobel Peace Prize from his naive Western audience while simultaneously being hailed as the leader of the jihad against the Jews by his Arab audience. This trick worked quite well for many years until the advent of the Internet, when for the first time the Western audience could finally hear what he was saying when they weren't supposed to be listening.

A similar problem bedevils most politicians in the modern era, especially during any election season that has both a primary and then a general election. Obama for a year clearly spelled out his far-left position when addressing the far-left wing of the Democratic Party, using their support to take the nomination from Hillary Clinton. But now that we're in the general election, Obama is furiously backpedaling at top speed, denying or modifying or attempting to spin not just his primary positions, but a lifetime of far-left activism -- because those positions won't fly with the general public.


Conclusion


Now, it could very well be that, after all is said and done, Obama will indeed win this election -- I can't predict the future any better than can anyone else. The Obama campaign and its supporters are also engaging in many other strategies (unrelated to the exaggeration of his popularity) that have likely been effective -- such as blanketing the airwaves with advertisements, disparaging McCain, insulting Palin, and so on. The unabashed and unapologetic Obama boosterism from the traditional media certainly isn't hurting either. In prior elections, candidates worried about an "October Surprise," some last-minute revelation or scandal that threatens to realign the entire race. But in 2008, two or three October Surprises seem to be cropping up every single day, and there's no reliable way to predict what will happen next (other than that the media will try to emphasize the anti-McCain news and downplay the anti-Obama news). And it may be that less than 50% of the population was ever interested in voting for McCain in the first place, and that an Obama victory was a foregone conclusion long before the campaign even began; I simply don't know. However, if Obama does win, it will be IN SPITE OF the counter-productive antics of his supporters, not because of them. I feel that all the exaggerations and bias polling and online poll-stuffing and comment-spamming have only served to increase a desperate come-from-behind energy in the McCain campaign, and induce a sense of complacency and inevitable victory among rank-and-file Obama voters. However: If McCain wins, then Obama's supporters will only have themselves to blame.

Will the exaggerations become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as assumed, or are Obama supporters spinning further and further away from reality, constructing one unsupportable exaggeration on top of another -- only to be stunned on election day when the actual results, once again, don't match either their pre-vote opinion polling or their post-vote exit polling?

Yet it may very well be that an army of glum, dispirited and pessimistic conservatives will reluctantly trudge to the polls on November 4, each one imagining they are the only remaining person in the entire country voting for McCain, and lo and behold -- they'll turn out to be a silent majority after all.

[homedawg]

Assassination of Joe the Plumber: Obama’s Thugocracy on Display
by JB Williams (10/20/08)


Within hours of Joe the Plumber confronting Barack Obama on his open promise of socialism, Joe the Plumber was viciously thrust onto the international scene, becoming an example of just what happens to any average red blooded American who dares to question the making of the socialist “messiah” Obama.

Twenty four hours after Joe made his way through the crowd of Obamabots in front of his home to ask the most relevant question of the 2008 election, he found himself the target of brutal Obama campaign war room character assassins. Within moments, the world learned more about Joe the Plumber than eighteen months of “new media” investigations had uncovered about Obama, while the mainstream media ran interference.

Obama’s war room launched a full-scale character assassination on Joe, - “he’s not a plumber” – “he has a tax lien” – “he only makes $20,000 a year and is in no position to purchase his bosses failing plumbing company” – “he’s a McCain plant” – “his name is not Joe...”

The Obama Media rushed to the aid of their “anointed messiah” and joined the amen chorus of paid Obama bloggers who had immediately went to guns in a take-no-prisoners attack on the Ohio voter who foolishly dared to question Obama’s plan to pillage every Joe the Plumber across America, who still believes that freedom not - doled out free stuff, individual achievement - not government entitlements, will empower every American.

Joe asked a simple straight-forward question, “Why do I not have a right to my own earnings?”

For a change, Obama gave a straightforward answer… “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance at success, too.” (No! he said, “I want to spread the wealth around.” i.e. your hard earned wealth!!)

The implication was clear, and frightening to every traditional American. In one rarely unscripted moment, Obama confirmed what opponents had been saying about him for months. His idea of “change” is based upon Marxism, “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need,” – and all of it, according to Messiah Obama…

The answer to Joe’s innocent question shocked the nation and became the centerpiece of the final presidential debate. Therefore, Joe must be destroyed! Every “Joe the plumber” across America must be silenced. Joe must be made an example!

Before asking Obama that question, Joe’s friends and neighbors had no idea how much money Joe made, whether or not he was current on his taxes, whether he was a licensed plumber or just a good plumber. Now Joe’s life is an open book… and he’s not running for any office at all.

Meanwhile, Obama’s life remains a laundry list of dirty secrets!

* Two weeks before the election, Obama refuses to offer documentation of legal citizenship, NO official birth certificate produced yet!
* Obama pokes fun, but still refuses to explain his Arab Muslim school records
* Obama’s ACORN Voter Fraud is under FBI investigation for federal crimes
* Now Obama is investigating the FBI investigation of ACORN – putting investigators on trial to defend known ACORN voter fraud
* Obama still refuses to unseal his college records
* Obama refuses to truthfully disclose Ayers and many other radical relationships
* Illegal Foreign money is still flooding into Obama campaign, unchecked!
* Obama “Senator Government” still lying about economic – tax plan
* Obama won’t explain why Saudi Royalty front-man, Dr. Khalid Al Mansour was grooming him through college
* Arab world campaign contributions ‘may enable him to win U.S. presidency’
* Obama joined Libya’s Gadhafi among top contributors to Kenya communist thug and Obama cousin, Odinga

The list of Obama secrets goes on and on and on… That’s part of the problem. There are so many evil Obama associations and the effort to conceal them all has been so massive, that there are not enough hours left to investigate it all before the election.

Yet it is clear that the Obama Media worked harder to investigate Joe the Plumber than they have to vet Obama the socialist Muslim. Why?

Obama Supporters Don’t Care

Obama’s core supporters are staunchly anti-America. They are not at all concerned with any of the very real stories of evil swirling around their candidate, or any of the well-documented facts about their candidate, which would immediately disqualify anyone, but an “anointed messiah.”

Not “ONE OF US!”

Despite massive efforts to conceal all of Obama’s past, his college records, his life-long associations with known terrorists, criminals, communists and racists, one thing is clear to every loyal American. Joe is the common man that Democrats claim to represent. But as we have seen over and over again, Joe is the man that left-wing elitist Democrats like Obama have come to attack instead. Joe is one of us, and it is glaringly obvious....

Obama is NOT ONE of US!

The color of his skin is of no consequence. Great Americans come in all shapes, sizes, colors and religious doctrines. A brief look at our men and women in uniform serving valiantly to defend our freedom here and abroad, will remove any doubts about the notion that great Americans are only white, only Christian or only Republican.

Yet, they inherently know when someone is “one of us” and when someone is “one of them.” And no matter color or creed, this is the only thing that matters. Loyalty to America, her founding values of individual freedom and as Joe pointed out, the “unalienable” right of EVERY American to self-determination, without punitive measures from a King or a “messiah.”

Plumber Joe was able to immediately see through Obama’s lies and promises of anti-American policies with simple clarity. That’s what makes Joe dangerous to the Obama campaign.

Obama is NOT one of us!

* Terrorists and our enemies around the globe cheer an Obama Presidency. Why?
* International money is illegally flooding into the Obama campaign. Why?
* Domestic and foreign Communists and Socialists support Obama. Why?
* Rogue regimes that hate everything America is, support Obama. Why?
* The foulest mouthed anti-American domestic thugs support Obama. Why?

Joe the plumber is “one of US!”

But NONE of the people who support the Obama campaign are “one of us!” That’s why Joe must be destroyed! His character must be assassinated. He must be silenced…

All American Joe’s must be silenced

If you speak out against Obama on the basis of his secret life, his blank résumé, his many evil associations, his connection to ACORN voter fraud, his illegal foreign campaign contributions, his active role in the current financial crisis, or any other legitimate concern, you will be labeled a “racist”… or worse.

Like Joe, your character will be assassinated. You will be made a mockery of, and silenced, to save your family from unbridled attack.

It’s the common Joe vs. Senator Government!

That’s what this election is all about. Not Republican vs. Democrat, not Christian vs. Atheist, not white man vs. black man, not even Obama vs. McCain or Palin.

This election is about Senator Government and all of his domestic and international terrorists, criminals and thugs, and all of their money, against the average American of every color and creed.

WAKE UP JOE!

EVERY red blooded American Joe MUST be in the voting booth on November 4th to defeat Barack Hussein Obama and all of his international thug friends!

Shame on us for allowing a known unrepentant terrorist to become a college professor influencing the minds of our children with impunity.

But if we allow this false “messiah” the power of the Oval Office, America deserves to fall!

Will the “silent majority” remain silent, and is it even an American majority anymore?

These are the times that try men’s soul’s… If real Americans are indeed still a majority, we can afford to be silent NO MORE!

VOTE NO HUSSEIN OBAMA on November 4th!

The future of this nation depends on YOU Joe! - You, me, John McCain & Sarah Palin!

[homedawg]

On Socialism & Wealth Redistribution: Michelle Obama Spent $447.39 on an Afternoon Snack

According to Michelle Obama,
“The truth is, in order to get things like Universal Health Care
and a revamped Education System,
then someone is going to have to give up a piece of the pie
so that someone else can have more.”

Oh, really? Who is the someone who gives up a piece of the pie?

On October, 15,2008, Michelle Obama spent $447.39 on room service (for 2)
at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for an afternoon snack of
Lobster Hors D’Oeuvres ($50.00),
Whole Steamed Lobsters (100.00),
Iranian Osetra Caviar ($150.00),
and Bollinger Champagne ($44.00)

Sounds exquisite, doesn’t it, if your culinary tastes run to lobster, caviar and champagne?
But this insight into the Obama lifestyle makes us wonder how often Joe ‘the Plumber’
Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio and his family eat lobster with all the trimmings.

How often does the average person eat like this? Or is it only those who make $250,000
or more? Or only the 95% of the population laboring under the illusion that they will get
tax breaks under the Obama Wealth Redistribution Plan?

[homedawg]

ICYMI: Joe Biden Says Electing Barack Obama Guarantees An International Crisis


"It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy." -- Joe Biden

"Biden to Supporters: 'Gird Your Loins', For the Next President 'It's Like Cleaning Augean Stables'"
By Matthew Jaffe
ABC News' Political Radar
October 20, 2008

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in power and he will need supporters to stand by him as he makes tough, and possibly unpopular, decisions.

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."



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[homedawg]

Concerned about Obama's naive foreign policy?


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