GOP video they are running in Ill. and John McCain speaks out

John McCain spoke out against this video. I couldn't believe it when I heard it on Fox News. Now that I think of it, it is a classic John McCain. Like he said in his campaign speeches, that if he didn't win, then Obama would be his President. If you will think about it, he has never been one for Partisan politics. Party loyalty means nothing to him. His campaign slogan was "Country First".

PoliticoHere is an excerpt:

"He's had a statement every single day, saying that the Obama team should reveal all contacts they've had with Governor [Rod] Blagojevich. He says that Obama's promise of transparency to the American people is now being tested. Do you agree with that?”

McCain replied: “I think that the Obama campaign should and will give all information necessary. You know, in all due respect to the Republican National Committee and anybody — right now, I think we should try to be working constructively together, not only on an issue such as this, but on the economy stimulus package, reforms that are necessary. And so, I don't know all the details of the relationship between President-elect Obama's campaign or his people and the governor of Illinois, but I have some confidence that all the information will come out. It always does, it seems to me.”

GOP video they are running in Ill. and John McCain speaks out

Why won’t Barack Obama end the controversy?

Why won’t Barack Obama end the controversy?
I was reading an article about the birth certificate issue, and it occurred to me that Barack Obama could end a lot of this controversy by coming clean with the American Public. Why won’t he hand over the long form of his birth certificate? By him not doing so, it makes the American Public, (his constituents) think that he is hiding something. It does nothing but build up the people to not trust him with the Presidency.

Yet, he will spend hundreds of dollars to pay an attorney to keep his birth certificate from being seen. He could solve other issues about his citizenship by handing over the documents that the 13 lawsuits are asking for. Instead, he chooses to let it go through the Supreme Court and take up the honorable justice’s time, and our taxpayer money to let all this “take its course.”

I am in no way defending him on this issue. But, if you will think back to the time before the election when Reverend Wright was spewing his hatred for all the country to see, he didn’t leave his church. Not until Reverend Wright came out against him.

What did Barack Obama do? He claimed he didn’t know what Reverend Wright had been saying, although he sat in a pew at his church for 20 years. The sermons were available right there in the church.

These are just a few examples of how Barack Obama handles situations. How many times did he just vote present in the Illinois legislature? Is it indecision, or does he love to have controversy?

Back during the campaign, when the financial crisis broke, Barack Obama voted present then. John McCain actually tried to do something, and got criticized for it, while Obama did nothing.

Then the MSM, paints Barack Obama’s failure to do anything as leadership ability. Not in my opinion. It is a blatant inability on Barack Obama’s part to make decisions. That is why it took him so long to come up with any plans to help in the financial crisis. This is how he operates.

Instead of looking at a problem straight on, and dealing with it, he ignores the problem, hoping that it will go away. He uses people to get his agenda, and then he throws them under the bus. There is quite a stack of people going under the bus, eventually it will become quite crowded under there.

I hate to think what will happen if he makes it to the Presidency and we have a terrorist attack or some other sort of emergency. He will ignore it until he has to make a decision. This is the way he handles problems. He brings a lot of his problems on himself. That is not leadership and management.

I am glad that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t like that. Three states had already succeeded from the Union when he took office. He handled the problems as quickly as he could. He didn’t sit in the indecision mode until he could do it no longer.

His son Willie died while he was in the White House, and three weeks later, Lincoln commanded his Union Armies himself because he wasn’t satisfied by how the war was going. Barack Obama would not do it, if he were in that situation.

It makes me sick how the MSM are trying to compare Barack Obama to President Lincoln. Just because he read a book on how Lincoln put rivals in the cabinet. Barack Obama, you are not Abraham Lincoln, and you will never be. You aren’t Franklin Roosevelt either. Both of these former presidents had the ability to make decisions, and you have trouble with it.

I just now heard that he has spoken out that the Governor of Illinois has to go. Why didn’t he say that yesterday? This case will be extremely interesting when all the details come out.

barack obama

Why won’t Barack Obama end the controversy?

Joe the Plumber says McCain appalled me

Click here.

Joe Wurzelbacher lashed out Tuesday at former GOP presidential nominee John McCain, the man who made Wurzelbacher famous as “Joe the Plumber.”

Wurzelbacher told conservative radio host Glenn Beck that he felt “dirty” after “being on the campaign trail and seeing some of the things that take place.”

Recalling a conversation he had with McCain about the $700 billion financial industry bailout in September, Wurzelbacher said: “When I was on the bus with him, I asked him a lot of questions about the bailout because most Americans did not want that to happen.”

“I asked him some pretty direct questions,” he continued. “Some of the answers you guys are gonna receive — they appalled me, absolutely. I was angry. In fact, I wanted to get off the bus after I talked to him.”

Asked why he didn’t leave McCain’s campaign if he was “appalled” by the candidate, Wurzelbacher said, “honestly, because the thought of Barack Obama as president scares me even more.”

While Wurzelbacher was critical of McCain during the interview, he had nothing but praise for his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. “Sarah Palin is absolutely the real deal,” he said.

Joe the Plumber says McCain appalled me

The New York Times already starting defending Obama

They are already starting to defend him. Check out this article

The New York Times already starting defending Obama

They all know

They all know

Gov. Of Illinois (D) gets arrested

Click here.

Do you think that he will sing like a canary to get a better deal? Will Barack Obama be involved in it?

Gov. Of Illinois (D) gets arrested

Court won't review Obama's eligibility to serve

This is all I could find on this story. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama-birth-certificate1dec08,0,7258812.story

Court won't review Obama's eligibility to serve
By Tim Jones | Tribune correspondent
9:16 AM CST, December 8, 2008
UPDATE: The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth.

The court did not comment on its order Monday rejecting the call by Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J., to intervene in the presidential election. Donofrio says that since Obama had dual nationality at birth -- his mother was American and his Kenyan father at the time was a British subject -- he cannot possibly be a "natural born citizen," one of the requirements the Constitution lists for eligibility to be president.

Donofrio also contends that two other candidates, Republican John McCain and Socialist Workers candidate Roger Calero, also are not natural-born citizens and thus ineligible to be president.

At least one other appeal over Obama's citizenship remains at the court. Philip J. Berg of Lafayette Hill, Pa., argues that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii as Obama says and the Hawaii secretary of state has confirmed. Berg says Obama also may be a citizen of Indonesia, where he lived as a boy. Federal courts in Pennsylvania have dismissed Berg's lawsuit.

Court won't review Obama's eligibility to serve

Obama's Contempt for our Constitution

I found the following article very interesting.

Obama's Contempt for our Constitution


November 1, 2008
by Joan Swirsky

On February 10, 2007, Senator Barack Obama stood outside the Old State Capitol building in Illinois and announced his intention to run for the presidency.

"I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity, to this announcement," Obama said. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I've been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change."

Of course, that depends on what his definition of “been there long enough” is. Actually, after he took office in November 2004, he spent a total of 143 days “on the job” – the number of days the senate was in session – before beginning his campaign for President of the United States. So now we know that, to Obama, “been there long enough” means that four months and change is quite enough preparation to be not only president but also the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, chief executive of the federal government, and leader of the free world.

At least he got the “audacity” part right.

In responding to disparagement from his opponents about the three years he spent as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama explained - with startlingly unselfconscious narcissism - that it was a good preparation for the top job in the world because it helped in "understanding where I'm coming from, who I believe in, who I'm fighting for and why I'm in this race."

"They haven't talked about the fact that I was a civil rights lawyer;" Obama added. "They haven't talked about the fact that I taught constitutional law..."

Okay, let's talk about that, especially because it is on the basis of a Constitutional challenge that Obama was sued by lawyer Philip J. Berg. In short, Berg has insisted that Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen, was possibly born on foreign soil to an American mother and Kenyan father, may hold dual American-Indonesian citizenship, and therefore does meet the eligibility requirements that are spelled out in exquisite detail in the United States Constitution. He asked that Obama's name be removed from the ballot.

Berg's case was dismissed on October 24 by Judge Barclay Surrick, but he promptly took the case before Judge David Souter of the Supreme Court, whose disposition is anticipated before the election on Tuesday, November 4 If no judgment is rendered, Berg anticipates that if Obama is elected, a Constitutional crisis will ensue. At this point, numerous citizens throughout the country have petitioned their own courts to disqualify Obama.

"I TAUGHT CONSTITUTIONAL LAW"

Well, I ask, what part of the Constitution did Obama not "get"?

In the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1, it states: No person except a natural born citizen or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.

Title 8 of the U.S. Code explains what "natural born citizen" means:

Anyone born inside the United States.
Any Indian or Eskimo born in the United States, provided being a citizen of the U.S. does not impair the person's status as a citizen of the tribe.
Anyone born outside the United States, both of whose parents are citizens of the U.S., as long as one parent has lived in the U.S.
Anyone born outside the United States, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year and the other parent is a U.S. national.
Anyone born in a U.S. possession, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year.
Anyone found in the U.S. under the age of five, whose parentage cannot be determined, as long as proof of non-citizenship is not provided by age 21.
Anyone born outside the United States, if one parent is an alien and as long as the other parent is a citizen of the U.S. who lived in the U.S. for at least five years (with military and diplomatic service included in this time).
A final, historical condition: a person born before 5/24/1934 of an alien father and a U.S. citizen mother who has lived in the U.S.
Anyone falling into these categories is considered natural-born, and is eligible to run for President or Vice President. These provisions allow the children of military families to be considered natural-born. For example, separate sections of the U.S. Code address territories that the United States has acquired over time, such as Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawaii, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam. And the law contains one other section about the Panama Canal Zone and the nation of Panama. It states that anyone born in the Canal Zone or in Panama itself, on or after February 26, 1904, to a mother and/or father who is a United States citizen, was "declared" to be a United States citizen.

Because this section doesn't carry the words "natural-born" or "citizen at birth," this became an issue for Sen. John McCain when he ran for president in 2000. But that issue was resolved when it was found that McCain was considered a natural-born citizen under 8 USC 1401(c): "a person born outside of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents both of whom are citizens of the United States and one of whom has had a residence in the United States or one of its outlying possessions, prior to the birth of such person.

If Obama meets the above criteria, then why has he still not produced a certifiably authentic birth certificate?

UNDISGUISED CONTEMPT

Selwyn Duke, in the American Thinker, writes, "Leftists...could attempt to change the Constitution so that it reflects their agenda, but this is a long, drawn-out, difficult process that requires, of all things, actual public support for your aims. And it's easier to change the courts - and install `ideological' justices who will impose left-wing orthodoxy from the bench - than the will of the subjects. Consider that liberals are ever trying to destroy tradition, as it stands in the way of progressivism. Consider that a consistent definition of liberalism - one that epitomizes the modern left (those progressives) - involves the desire to change the status quo. So what it means is that, by definition, a liberal who understands the Constitution cannot believe in it."

Aha! So that is why Obama told an NPR radio interviewer in 2001 that the Warren Court did not "break free from the essential constraints" found in the Constitution and therefore one of the "tragedies" of the civil rights movement was that "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth..."

Upon hearing a tape of the interview, Ed Morrissey of CaptainsQuarters blog fame, "The government does not exist to determine the acceptable level of wealth of its individual citizens. For government to assume that role, it would have to end private property rights and assume all property belonged to the State. That is classic Marxism. Barack Obama complains that the Constitution is a `charter of negative liberties.' That's because the Constitution was intended as a limiting document, to curtail the power of the federal government vis-à-vis the states and the individual. Barack Obama wants to reverse that entirely. And that's radical change you'd better believe in, or else."

Rush Limbaugh also weighed in: "Barack Obama calls himself a `constitutional professor' or a `constitutional scholar.' In truth, Barack Obama was an anti-constitutionalist professor. He studied the Constitution and he flatly rejected it. He doesn't like the Constitution. He thinks it is flawed. Now I understand why he was so reluctant to wear the American flag lapel pin....he says that the Constitution `is a charter of negative liberties. This is nothing short of a condemnation of the Constitution, and he calls himself a professor. The greatest government, the freest society in the history of the world, and Professor Obama calls it a charter of negative liberties! To me, ladies and gentlemen, the Constitution is a gift of God. The Constitution is not a disappointment. It's a blessing. What kind of person does not understand the purpose and meaning of a document written by the greatest defenders of liberty the world has ever known? Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Washington, Hamilton - they created a charter of negative liberties?"

In the same radio interview, Obama said: "I think we can say that, uh, uh, the Constitution reflected a enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and -- and, uh, -- and, uh, that the framers had that same blind spot."

"This is how he views the Supreme Court," Limbaugh railed. "And he will have the power to populate it with people who believe in those very things. How is he going to place his hand on the Bible and swear that he, Barack Hussein Obama, will uphold the Constitution that he feels reflects the nation's fundamental flaw?"

It is now no wonder that Obama has refused to provide his birth certificate! He wants to circumvent the Constitution and, by so doing, "prove" that it's a fundamentally flawed document, worthy of the efforts he and his radical far-left acolytes will lead to challenge every Amendment in the Bill of Rights, including: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition, and the prohibition against depriving any citizen of life, liberty, and property, et al.

THIS WAS THEIR FIRST STEP

In April of this year, a number of Obama's congressional supporters - including Gov. Claire McCaskill (D-MOi), Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Sen. James Webb (D-VA) -proposed and passed a Resolution (S.Res.511) entitled: Recognizing that John Sidney McCain, III, is a natural born citizen.

Duh.

This was the Resolution:

Whereas the Constitution of the United States requires that, to be eligible for the Office of the President, a person must be a `natural born Citizen' of the United States;
Whereas the term `natural born Citizen', as that term appears in Article II, Section 1, is not defined in the Constitution of the United States;
Whereas there is no evidence of the intention of the Framers or any Congress to limit the constitutional rights of children born to Americans serving in the military nor to prevent those children from serving as their country's President;
Whereas such limitations would be inconsistent with the purpose and intent of the `natural born Citizen' clause of the Constitution of the United States, as evidenced by the First Congress's own statute defining the term `natural born Citizen';
Whereas the well-being of all citizens of the United States is preserved and enhanced by the men and women who are assigned to serve our country outside of our national borders;
Whereas previous presidential candidates were born outside of the United States of America and were understood to be eligible to be President; and
Whereas John Sidney McCain, III, was born to American citizens on an American military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That John Sidney McCain, III, is a `natural born Citizen' under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United Calendar No. 715110th CONGRESS2d SessionS. RES. 511RESOLUTIONRecognizing that John Sidney McCain, III, is a natural born citizen.April 24, 2008. Reported without amendment States.
Just how dumb do McCaskill and Obama & Co. think the American people are? Here they attempt to create a blanket Resolution that says ALL foreign-born candidates are eligible for the U.S. presidency, when in fact McCain did not need this Resolution and neither did Bill Richardson when he ran for president this year. In fact, to my knowledge no presidential nominee in American history has ever needed a Resolution of this kind until Obama - who has still not produced a valid birth certificate! - entered the race.

So why this weird Resolution? Clearly so Obama could circumvent the Constitution he finds so distasteful.

According to Raymond S. Kraft, an attorney and writer: "The president, The Supreme Court justices, and all members of Congress, have taken an oath to defend and protect the Constitution and have an affirmative duty to protect the Constitution by doing whatever is necessary to insure that presidential (and congressional) candidates meet the Constitutional requirements for the offices they seek. It is a mandatory duty, and failure to do so violate their oaths of office. If they don't follow this oath in Obama's case, it will be the biggest swindle in American history, allowing Obama and the DNC to have concealed his true identity and lack of citizenship, thereby conning Democrats out of hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign contributions. If justice is served, dozens of `leading' Democrats should go to prison for fraud."
--------------------------------------------
Joan Swirsky (http://www.joanswirsky.com/) is a New York-based journalist and author who can be reached at joansharon@aol.com

http://www.rightsidenews.com/200811012434/editorial/obama-s-contempt-for-our-constitution.html

Obama's Contempt for our Constitution

Chester Author: an interesting read

This is very interesting information that Leo Donofrio discovered while doing research on former presidents.

Naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com

HISTORICAL BREAKTHROUGH - PROOF: CHESTER ARTHUR CONCEALED HE WAS A BRITISH SUBJECT AT BIRTH
Posted in Uncategorized on December 6, 2008 by naturalborncitizen
December 6, 2008 6:36 PM

[I have collaborated on this with my sister and historian Greg Dehler, author of "Chester Allan Arthur", Published by Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2006 ISBN 1600210791, 9781600210792 192 pages. ]

I’ve been forwarded the actual naturalization record for William Arthur on microfiche, obtained from the Library of Congress. He was naturalized in New York State and became a United States citizen in August 1843.

Chester Arthur perpetrated a fraud as to his eligibility to be Vice President by spreading various lies about his parents’ heritage. President Arthur’s father, William Arthur, became a United States citizen in August 1843. But Chester Arthur was born in 1829. Therefore, he was a British Citizen by descent, and a dual citizen at birth, if not his whole life.

He wasn’t a “natural born citizen” and he knew it.

We’ve also uncovered many lies told by Chester Arthur to the press which kept this fact from public view when he ran for Vice President in 1880. Garfield won the election, became President in 1881, and was assassinated by a fanatical Chester Arthur supporter that same year.

How ironic that the allegations started by Arthur Hinman in his pamphlet entitled, “How A British Subject Became President”, have turned out to be true…but not for the reason Hinman suggested.

Hinman alleged that Arthur was born in Ireland or Canada as a British subject. It was bunk. It’s been definitively established that Chester Arthur was born in Vermont. But Hinman turns out to be correct anyway since Chester Arthur was a British citizen/subject by virtue of his father not having naturalized as a United States citizen until Chester Arthur was almost 14 years old.

That means Chester Arthur was a British subject at the time of his birth.

We’ve uncovered news clips exposing a thorough trail of lies, all of which served to obscure Chester Arthur’s true history of having been born as a British citizen.

Chester Arthur’s lies came during his Vice Presidential campaign in 1880. His fraudulent attempt to obfuscate family history provides context and evidence that in 1880 it was recognized that having been born as a British citizen would make one ineligible to be President or VP. His falsification of family history indicates he was aware of POTUS ineligibility.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Chester Arthur was in politics at the time of the 14th Amendment’s ratification. He was a lawyer and a politician while the 14th Amendment was being debated. It was ratified in 1867. In that same year Chester Arthur rose to become chairperson of the Executive Committee of the State Republican Committee. He would have been fully cognizant of the natural born citizen issue and that should he ever run for POTUS or VP, problems could arise.

He would have known that if anybody found out his father naturalized after he was born, he could never be President or Vice President.

CHESTER’S LIES

The definitive biography on Chester Arthur is “Gentleman Boss” by Thomas Reeves. It’s an exhaustive reference. Many of the blanks in Chester Arthur’s legend were filled in by this book which utilized interviews with family members and authentic documents like the Arthur family Bible. It was a necessary work since old Chester Arthur was a very wily protector of his strange history. He burned all of his papers. (See page 2365.)

“Gentleman Boss” establishes, on page 4, that Chester Arthur’s father William was born in Ireland, 1796, and emigrated to Canada in 1818 or 1819. His mother Malvina was born in Vermont and his parents eloped in Canada in 1821. They had their first child, Regina, in Dunham, Canada on March 8, 1822.

By no later than 1824, the Arthur family had moved to Burlington, Vermont. Their second child Jane was born there on March 14, 1824. Chester Arthur was their fifth child, and he was born on October 5, 1829. Reeves established these facts (and the correct date of Chester Arthur’s birth) from the Arthur family Bible.

From “Gentleman Boss”, page 202 and 203:

“…Hinman was hired, apparently by democrats, to explore rumors that Arthur had been born in a foreign country, was not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and was thus, by the Constitution, ineligible for the vice-presidency. By mid-August, Hinman was claiming that Arthur was born in Ireland and had been brought to the United States by his father when he was fourteen. Arthur denied the charge and said that his mother was a New Englander who had never left her native country — a statement every member of the Arthur family knew was untrue.”

Arthur’s mother had lived in Canada with her husband and even had her first child there.

In the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, an article interviewing Chester Arthur about Hinman’s accusations was published on August 13, 1880. In that article, Chester Arthur defended himself as follows:

“My father, the late Rev. William Arthur, D.D., was of Scotch blood, and was a native of the North of Ireland. He came to this country when he was eighteen years of age, and resided here several years before he was married.”

This was another blatant lie. His father emigrated from Ireland to Canada at the age of 22 or 23. William Arthur didn’t come to the United States until sometime between March 1822 - when his first child was born in Dunham, Canada - and March 1824 - when his second child was born in Burlington, Vermont. The youngest he could have been when he came to Vermont was 26.

On August 16, 1880 Chester Arthur told the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper that at the time of his birth, his father was forty years old. Another blatant lie. His father would have been only thirty-three years old when Chester was born.

In that same article he lied that his father settled in Vermont and reiterated the lie that William came here at the age of eighteen. This age discrepancy was exposed in the August 19, 1880 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle in an article written by Hinman .

It was very convenient for Arthur that Hinman kept the focus on the extraordinary and false claim - that Arthur was born abroad - while the more subtle and true eligibility issue stayed hidden in plain site.

FATEFUL FACTS

I contacted Greg Dehler a few days ago after finding a reference in his Chester Arthur biography which said William Arthur became a citizen in 1843. I wrote to Greg and asked him about the reference. As fate would have it, Mr. Dehler, after checking his notes, wrote back to me to say that he got it from Thomas Reeves’ book, “Gentleman Boss”.

I went to the library the next day and devoured the Reeves book. But the reference to William’s naturalization was not there. Greg also knew I was interested in the Hinman scandal and pointed me to the Brooklyn Eagle search engine from the Brooklyn public library.

I began poking around and discovered a few of the lies mentioned above.

Earlier today I was telling my sister that this matter of Chester Arthur having falsified his parents’ personal history might lead to a very important revision of history. I suggested we put together an outline of a book as we might be able to prove that Chester Arthur was a fraudulent President and that would be quite a story. My sister thought I was jumping the gun a bit in that we really needed to define when William Arthur was naturalized before we could get excited.

About an hour later I received an email from Greg Dehler. I’ll let you read it:

Leo,

Needless to say I was more than a little embarrassed that you could not locate the reference in Reeves. I thought that was odd because my note concerning William Arthur was with the Reeves notes. I conducted a more thorough search and found the source. It was in the Chester A. Arthur Papers (what is left of them at least) at the LOC. I own the microfilm reels and made a copy for you which is attached. The Washington County Clerk in NYS dates it August 31, 1843. How does this affect Chet?

Greg

I almost fell off my chair when I downloaded the William Arthur naturalization PDF and was staring at the shifting sands of history.

Chester Arthur had something to hide.

He had all of his papers burned which was very odd for a President.

Arthur lied about his mother’s time in Canada. He lied about his father’s time in Canada. He lied about his father’s age plus where and when he got off the boat from Ireland. By obscuring his parents’ personal history he curtailed the possibility that anybody might discover he was born many years before his father had naturalized.

When Chester runs for VP, Hinman comes along essentially demanding to see Chester’s birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States. This causes a minor scandal easily thwarted by Chester, because Chester was born in Vermont…but at the same time, the fake scandal provides cover for the real scandal.

Is this the twilight zone?

William Arthur was not a naturalized citizen at the time of Chester Arthur’s birth, and therefore Chester Arthur was a British subject at birth and not eligible to be Vice President or President.

Chester Arthur lied about his father’s emigration to Canada and the time his mother spent there married to William. Some sixty years later, Chester lied about all of this and kept his candidacy on track. Back then it would have been virtually impossible to see through this, especially since Arthur’s father had died in 1875 and had been a United States citizen for thirty-two years.

And without knowledge of his father’s time in Canada, or the proper timeline of events, potential researchers in 1880 would have been hard pressed to even know where to start.

Reeves proved that Arthur changed his birth year from 1829 to 1830. I don’t know if that would have protected recorded information. It’s another lie. I just don’t know what it means.

Because Chester Arthur covered up his British citizenship, any precedent he might have set that the country has had a President born of an alien father is nullified completely as Chester Arthur was a usurper to the Presidency. He wouldn’t have been on the ticket if it was public knowledge. Nobody knew Arthur was a British subject because nobody looked in the right place for the truth.

And it’s no precedent to follow.

Leo C. Donofrio COPYRIGHT 2008

Chester Author: an interesting read

McCain Couldn't Compete With Obama's Money

Click here

Karl Rove had a very interesting article about campaign funds during the election.

Both men and the national parties will report to the Federal Election Commission today how much money they raised in October and November. And what the numbers will probably show is that Mr. Obama outspent Mr. McCain by the biggest margin in history, perhaps a quarter of a billion dollars.

McCain Couldn't Compete With Obama's Money

My response to an article that I found last night

I found this article while surfing last night, and here is my response to it. The writer forgot to tell everyone that Jim Martin is outspending on ads by about three to one.
During the election, he ran more ads than Saxby Chambliss, and they were pretty nasty. He is running one now that probably took Saxby Chambliss out of context by saying he didn’t know what a recession was. He just runs that one sentence twice in his nasty ad.

He has been running ads about the bailout, which I feel he is being a hypocrite about. Barack Obama supported the bailout, as did John McCain. The reason that I call him a hypocrite, is because he is now running ads saying he backs Barack Obama completely, but yet he ran ads against Sen. Saxby Chambliss running him down for voting for the bailout when Obama supported it.

Although I hate what happened to his daughter, Saxby Chambliss isn’t running the ad. It is a 527 group doing it.

Obama is even running radio ads for Martin. So there is nastiness on both sides. ——Vickie

Freedom’s Watch attacks Democratic Senate candidate whose daughter was kidnapped as being soft on crime.
http://thinkprogress.org/ 2008/ 11/ 22/ chambliss-martin-crime/



Freedom’s Watch attacks Democratic Senate candidate whose daughter was kidnapped as being soft on crime. By Amanda Terkel at 6:40 pm Freedom’s Watch attacks Democratic Senate candidate whose daughter was kidnapped as being soft on crime.» Yesterday, the struggling Freedom’s Watch released an attack ad against Georgia’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jim Martin, saying that he “failed to look out for Georgia’s families.” “First he actually helped block stiffer penalties for drunk drivers,” warns the voice in the ad, which echoes previous GOP ads.

17 hours ago
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My response to an article that I found last night

The Night We Waved Goodbye to America (Peter Hitchens)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084111/PETER-HITCHENS-The-night-waved-goodbye-America--best-hope-Earth.html

The Night We Waved Goodbye to America (Peter Hitchens)

By Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail, UK:

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell - or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship - its nearest equivalent - is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated - but rather hesitant - invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will - ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King - in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.

Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street - which runs due north from the White House - the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party - the Republicans - to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

The Night We Waved Goodbye to America (Peter Hitchens)

Obama election spurs race crimes around country

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iEyLuiVkdd-f1RM5wnoR0kF4WbvgD94FQJKG0

By JESSE WASHINGTON – 2 hours ago

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting "Assassinate Obama." Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

From California to Maine, police have documented a range of alleged crimes, from vandalism and vague threats to at least one physical attack. Insults and taunts have been delivered by adults, college students and second-graders.

There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

One was in Snellville, Ga., where Denene Millner said a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." That night, someone trashed her sister-in-law's front lawn, mangled the Obama lawn signs, and left two pizza boxes filled with human feces outside the front door, Millner said.

She described her emotions as a combination of anger and fear.

"I can't say that every white person in Snellville is evil and anti-Obama and willing to desecrate my property because one or two idiots did it," said Millner, who is black. "But it definitely makes you look a little different at the people who you live with, and makes you wonder what they're capable of and what they're really thinking."

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is "a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them."

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old white Georgia native, expressed similar sentiments: "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change.

"If you had real change it would involve all the members of (Obama's) church being deported," he said.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War," said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. "It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries."

"Someone once said racism is like cancer," Ferris said. "It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission."

If so, America's remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama's victory.

Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.

The student's mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: "Whether you like it or not, we're in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision."

Other incidents include:

_Four North Carolina State University students admitted writing anti-Obama comments in a tunnel designated for free speech expression, including one that said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head." Obama has received more threats than any other president-elect, authorities say.

_At Standish, Maine, a sign inside the Oak Hill General Store read: "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool." Customers could sign up to bet $1 on a date when Obama would be killed. "Stabbing, shooting, roadside bombs, they all count," the sign said. At the bottom of the marker board was written "Let's hope someone wins."

_Racist graffiti was found in places including New York's Long Island, where two dozen cars were spray-painted; Kilgore, Texas, where the local high school and skate park were defaced; and the Los Angeles area, where swastikas, racial slurs and "Go Back To Africa" were spray painted on sidewalks, houses and cars.

_Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.

_University of Alabama professor Marsha L. Houston said a poster of the Obama family was ripped off her office door. A replacement poster was defaced with a death threat and a racial slur. "It seems the election brought the racist rats out of the woodwork," Houston said.

_Black figures were hanged by nooses from trees on Mount Desert Island, Maine, the Bangor Daily News reported. The president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas said a rope found hanging from a campus tree was apparently an abandoned swing and not a noose.

_Crosses were burned in yards of Obama supporters in Hardwick, N.J., and Apolacan Township, Pa.

_A black teenager in New York City said he was attacked with a bat on election night by four white men who shouted 'Obama.'

_In the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills, a black man said he found a note with a racial slur on his car windshield, saying "now that you voted for Obama, just watch out for your house."

Emotions are often raw after a hard-fought political campaign, but now those on the losing side have an easy target for their anger.

"The principle is very simple," said BJ Gallagher, a sociologist and co-author of the diversity book "A Peacock in the Land of Penguins." "If I can't hurt the person I'm angry at, then I'll vent my anger on a substitute, i.e., someone of the same race."

"We saw the same thing happen after the 9-11 attacks, as a wave of anti-Muslim violence swept the country. We saw it happen after the Rodney King verdict, when Los Angeles blacks erupted in rage at the injustice perpetrated by 'the white man.'"

"It's as stupid and ineffectual as kicking your dog when you've had a bad day at the office," Gallagher said. "But it happens a lot."

Associated Press writers Errin Haines, Jerry Harkavy, Jay Reeves, Johnny Clark and researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.

Obama election spurs race crimes around country

The Election, and some Patriotic links below it.

We are a nation that has forgotten about God. I am disappointed in the results, and disappointed in half of the American people's judgement for the first time in my life. We had a national media that didn't report the news, just their liberal views. They were in the pocket for Nobama. Reporters are supposed to be objective, and we can't trust our media in this country anymore.

Already, we have heard from Hugo Chavez, and Russia. Joe Biden said within six months. It was six hours after he won the election. Thank you America for putting our country in danger. Also, have you noticed the dive the stock market has taken? The first time in history that has happened since an election. Thanks again, Americans that voted him in.

You were just worried about your 401K, and the Bailout, weren't you? If Nobama makes the wrong decisions, we could be in some serious trouble. You didn't think about that when you voted in that Chicago Thug, did you? I might add, he didn't have the experience to be President. If he were to get a job with the FBI, he wouldn't pass the background test, yet you voted him in anyway. You knew about his associations. You did it anyway.

Now, we have a far-left President elect, and a Congress that is looney-left. The ones who voted these people in, are responsible. Nobama can do anything he wants to do now. Thanks Americans.

Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the house, a Democrat) set up the Republicans on the bailout bill. They could have passed it on their own, but they didn't want to be blamed by the voting public for it. They refused to go along with it the first time. Now, every one of the Republicans that voted for the bailout lost their seat, or their seat is in jeopardy. That is so wrong.

Now we have people in our country that are afraid. I suspect that many will begin to appreciate President Bush when he isn't in office anymore. We haven't had a terrorist attack in seven years. From day one, the media was on him. From day one, the Democraps started in on him. Mad about the election of 2000.

I was mad about the bailout and my 401K also. I didn't let it reflect my vote. Bill Clinton, a democrat did it to you, not the Republicans. Yet, the Republicans had to take the wrap for it because it was on their watch.

This election was a great victory for the Black people. That is the only good thing about it.

http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/APLEAFROMTHEPAST.HTML

http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/AMERICATHEBEAUTIFUL.HTML

http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/forsakenroots.html

http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/FREEDOMISNTFREE.HTML

The Election, and some Patriotic links below it.

We are going to get a change, will it be for the better?

Barack Obama promotes change we need.
We don't need his wealth spreading,
He is only planting a seed.

A seed of corruption, taxes and higher spending,
It is no wonder the banks aren't lending.

From his foreign connections and radical friends,
People can't see through him and it never ends.

He can give a good speech,
and talk a great talk,
But if he is questioned,
he will then balk.

A plumber named Joe,
found that out.
His background was checked,
and spread about.


The election is close, and we have a choice,
We can vote against him and his liberal voice.

Stand up and fight now for your country,
Don't let socialism in.
If we stick together, we can win.

For division had crept into our ranks,
we need to find some common ground.
We can't come together, until it is found.

We need each other, both left and right.
To heal our country, we have to fight.

For an eagle to fly, it needs two wings.
It has to have balance, or it can't fly.
It's the same with our Congress,
I hope you understand why.

It is all about checks and balances,
Just one party can't rule.
Didn't you learn about that in school?

Don't vote for your party, vote from your heart.
Let freedom ring by making a start.

We are going to get a change, will it be for the better?

Dozens Of Call Center Workers Walk Off Job In Protest Rather Than ReadMcCain Script Attacking Obama

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/dozens_of_call_center_workers.php
I guess they have been drinking too much koolaid, and watching the liberal media. Nobody thinks that Obama plays dirty. It doesn't matter what he does. The Obamanites are so ingrossed in him, I have never seen anything like it. The media knit-picks the Republicans, and they leave the Democraps alone. Kudos to the News people in Fla. for asking Joe Biden some tough questions. It is about time.------Vickie

Dozens Of Call Center Workers Walk Off Job In Protest Rather Than Read McCain Script Attacking Obama
By Greg Sargent - October 27, 2008, 5:18PM
Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.

"They walked out," Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren't fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. "They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you're not gonna get paid for the rest of the day."

The daughter, who wanted her name withheld fearing retribution from her employer, confirmed the story to us. "It was like at least 40 people," the daughter said. "People thought the script was nasty and they didn't wanna read it."

A second worker at the call center confirmed the episode, saying that "at least 30" workers had walked out after refusing to read the script.

"We were asked to read something saying [Obama and Democrats] were against protecting children from danger," this worker said. "I wouldn't do it. A lot of people left. They thought it was disgusting."

This worker, too, confirmed sacrificing pay to walk out, saying her supervisor told her: "If you don't wanna phone it you can just go home for the day."

The script coincided with this robo-slime call running in other states, but because robocalling is illegal in Indiana it was being read by call center workers.

Representatives at Americall in Indiana, and at the company's corporate headquarters in Naperville, Illinois, didn't return calls for comment.

Dozens Of Call Center Workers Walk Off Job In Protest Rather Than ReadMcCain Script Attacking Obama

Why Obama has to stay above 50 percent

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2116040/posts Skip to comments. Why Obama has to stay above 50 percent Salon ^ Bill Greener Posted on Sunday, October 26, 2008 8:13:00 PM by Chet 99 Oct. 27, 2008 As his campaign manager has described it, John McCain is now looking at a "narrow-victory scenario." "The fact that we're in the race at all," added Steve Schmidt, "is a miracle. Because the environment is so bad and the head wind is so strong." But talk of miracles and head winds aside, I think John McCain really does have a decent shot at winning, and that's not just because I'm a longtime Republican political operative. Despite what the polls seem to be saying, a closer look at the numbers shows that a Democratic victory is not a foregone conclusion. Why? Because if history is any guide, Barack Obama, as an African-American candidate for political office, needs to be polling consistently above 50 percent to win. And in crucial battleground states, he isn't. Much has been written about the so-called Bradley Effect, in which voters lie to pollsters about whether they're willing to vote for a black candidate. The Bradley Effect is meant to explain why, for example, Doug Wilder had a healthy 9-point lead up to Election Day in the 1989 Virginia governor's race, and a similar lead in exit polling, only to squeak through to victory by one-half of 1 percent. But I'm not talking about voters telling pollsters they're going to support Candidate A when they're really going to vote for Candidate B. There are two other ways in which voters can mislead pollsters about their intentions. One is to decline to participate in a poll. (More than one expert has suggested that conservatives are more likely to decline than liberals, meaning there could be many uncounted McCain voters.) The other is when pollsters participate in a poll but withhold information. (Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...

Why Obama has to stay above 50 percent

Palin: Obama acts as if he's already won election

All of the democraps have been acting like a Peacock lately. I wanted to smack Barnie Frank yesterday when he was talking about cutting the defense spending by 25 %.----Vickie

Palin: Obama acts as if he's already won election
By MITCH STACY – 1 day ago

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had a pointed message Sunday for Barack Obama: This thing isn't over yet. Palin said the Democratic presidential nominee was acting as if he's already won the election and had already written his inaugural address.

"Barack Obama and I both have spent quite some time on the basketball court," Palin told a raucous crowd of more than 5,000 at the convention center. "But where I come from, you have to win the game before you start cutting down the net."

Nine days before the election, Palin was making another push to sway voters in the battleground state of Florida, where polls show Republican nominee John McCain trails Obama in the fight for the state's 27 electoral votes. The Interstate 4 corridor between Tampa to Orlando, where Palin was concentrating her efforts Sunday, is where most of the state's undecided voters live. It takes 270 Electoral College votes to win the presidency.

"You kinda get the feeling that the Obama campaign thinks this whole election process is just a formality," she said. "They've overlooked, though, the minor detail of earning your confidence and your trust and winning your vote.

"And judging from the media coverage, it does seem the coronation is already set," Palin said.

Obama's campaign said the claim that he has written an inaugural address is "completely false." Spokesman Bill Burton said the reference to an address came from a New York Times report Saturday that former White House chief of staff John D. Podesta had written a draft inaugural speech for Obama and included it in a recent book. Burton said Podesta wrote it as a sample address, not for Obama but for whoever became the nominee.

Palin continued her criticism of an Obama economic plan that she says amounts to socialism, characterizing him as "Barack the wealth-spreader." She vowed that McCain would allow people to keep more of their money, and accused Obama of not telling the whole truth about what she said are his plans to redistribute wealth.

"It is not mean-spirited and it is not negative campaigning to call someone out on their record, and their plans and their associations," she said. "It is not negative campaigning. It is fairness to you, to the voters, that we talk about this."

She said Obama represents bigger government and more government spending.

"You can do the math or you can just go with your gut, and either way you draw the same conclusion, and that's that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes," Palin said. "John McCain and I have the complete opposite commitment."

Palin was joined on stage by her husband, Todd, their 7-year-old daughter Piper and infant son Trig, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. She was introduced by Elizabeth Hasselbeck, a co-host of the ABC talk show "The View" who often spars about politics with her more liberal mates on the set.

"Let me be honest, I was pretty much excited to talk for a full five minutes without getting interrupted," Hasselbeck joked with the crowd.

Later Sunday, Palin was to speak at a rally in Kissimmee, near Orlando, before heading to North Carolina.

On the Net:
McCain-Palin: http://www.johnmccain.com
Obama: http://www.barackobama.com

Palin: Obama acts as if he's already won election

Bloomberg news: Obama Widens Lead Over McCain in Nation, Key States (Update1)

Obama Widens Lead Over McCain in Nation, Key States (Update1) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aCc_gJ9GWBk8&refer=home

Obama Widens Lead Over McCain in Nation, Key States (Update1)

By Christopher Stern

Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Democrat Barack Obama widened his lead over Republican John McCain in most national polls and surveys of key states as the U.S. election contest heads into its final full week.

The Illinois senator was up 8 points over presidential rival McCain in an average of 16 polls taken during the last week, according to RealClearPolitics.com. Last week, Obama was up about 6 points.

Obama also has built leads in so-called battleground states including Pennsylvania and Ohio and he has an edge over McCain in some states that were Republican strongholds, such as Virginia and North Carolina.

``He had a great week,'' said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute in Hamden, Connecticut. Speaking of McCain, he said, ``No one has come from this far back in this little time.''

The Gallup Daily election tracking poll shows Obama up 7 points in its national survey. The CBS/New York Times and ABC/Washington Post polls put Obama up 13 points and 9 points respectively, while the latest Newsweek poll shows Obama leading McCain by 12 points.

In North Carolina, which has voted for the Republican candidate in nine of the last 10 elections, Obama and McCain are in a virtual dead heat, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports that has McCain ahead by 2 percentage points and another by Charlotte television station WSOC that has Obama in front by the same margin. In Virginia, four recent polls put Obama in the lead, by an average margin of 7 points.

Colorado Poll

In Colorado, which went to Republican President George W. Bush in 2004, Obama has taken a 12-point lead over McCain, according to a Rocky Mountain News/CBS4 News poll released late yesterday. The RealClearPolitics.com average of four Colorado polls shows Obama ahead by 7 points.

The Illinois senator has solidified support in the upper Midwest states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan that reliably voted for Democratic presidential candidates, while tying McCain in Indiana, a state that hasn't favored a Democrat since 1964.

Because of Obama's strength in states won by Bush in 2004, McCain now must focus on a limited number of contests for a victory, said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster based in Virginia. ``It just makes it more challenging,'' he said, comparing it to trying to draw an inside straight in poker.

``Pennsylvania is critical,'' said Ayres, ``You've got to hold Ohio and Florida.''

Ohio, Florida

Bush won Ohio and Florida in 2004, while Pennsylvania went to Democrat John Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts. Together, the three states have 68 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

Obama leads by 11 points in Pennsylvania, 6 points in Ohio and 2 in Florida, according to the Realclearpolitics.com average of polls in those states.

State and national polls have shown a wide range of results. For example, the Big 10 Battleground Poll, sponsored by several Midwestern universities, showed Obama leading by 12 points in Ohio, while a FoxNews/Rasmussen poll found McCain ahead by 2 points. An Ohio Newspaper Poll released today shows Obama ahead by 3 points, within the poll's margin of error.

The variation is said to be the result of different models used by pollsters. This year, some surveys are tweaking their assumptions on the number of new voters they expect to go to the polls. That can have a significant impact on polling results because first-time voters tend to favor Obama.

Demographic Changes

In addition, some states have seen significant demographic changes, particularly Virginia, which previously has matched other Southern states in voting patterns.

``There has been significant immigration to the state from people who are not southerners,'' said Ayers.

This year Gallup is issuing two versions of its polls. One is called traditional and shows a 7 point national lead for Obama among likely voters. An ``expanded poll'' conducted by Gallup assumes a larger turnout by new voters and shows Obama leading by 8 points.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christopher Stern in Washington at cstern3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 25, 2008 13:43 EDT

Bloomberg news: Obama Widens Lead Over McCain in Nation, Key States (Update1)

AP presidential poll: All even in the homestretch

AP presidential poll: All even in the homestretch

Oct 22 01:23 PM US/Eastern
By LIZ SIDOTI

WASHINGTON (AP) - The presidential race tightened after the final debate, with John McCain gaining among whites and people earning less than $50,000, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll that shows McCain and Barack Obama essentially running even among likely voters in the election homestretch.
The poll, which found Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 43 percent, supports what some Republicans and Democrats privately have said in recent days: that the race narrowed after the third debate as GOP-leaning voters drifted home to their party and McCain's "Joe the plumber" analogy struck a chord.

Three weeks ago, an AP-GfK survey found that Obama had surged to a seven-point lead over McCain, lifted by voters who thought the Democrat was better suited to lead the nation through its sudden economic crisis.

The contest is still volatile, and the split among voters is apparent less than two weeks before Election Day.

"I trust McCain more, and I do feel that he has more experience in government than Obama. I don't think Obama has been around long enough," said Angela Decker, 44, of La Porte, Ind.

But Karen Judd, 58, of Middleton, Wis., said, "Obama certainly has sufficient qualifications." She said any positive feelings about McCain evaporated with "the outright lying" in TV ads and his choice of running mate Sarah Palin, who "doesn't have the correct skills."

The new AP-GfK head-to-head result is a departure from some, but not all, recent national polls.

Obama and McCain were essentially tied among likely voters in the latest George Washington University Battleground Poll, conducted by Republican strategist Ed Goeas and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. In other surveys focusing on likely voters, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Obama up by 9 percentage points, while a poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center had Obama leading by 14. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, among the broader category of people registered to vote, found Obama ahead by 10 points.

Polls are snapshots of highly fluid campaigns. In this case, there is a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; that means Obama could be ahead by as many as 8 points or down by as many as 6. There are many reasons why polls differ, including methods of estimating likely voters and the wording of questions.

Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin political science professor and polling authority, said variation between polls occurs, in part, because pollsters interview random samples of people.

"If they all agree, somebody would be doing something terribly wrong," he said of polls. But he also said that surveys generally fall within a few points of each other, adding, "When you get much beyond that, there's something to explain."

The AP-GfK survey included interviews with a large sample of adults including 800 deemed likely to vote. Among all 1,101 adults interviewed, the survey showed Obama ahead 47 percent to 37 percent. He was up by five points among registered voters.

A significant number of the interviews were conducted by dialing a randomly selected sample of cell phone numbers, and thus this poll had a chance to reach voters who were excluded from some other polls.

It was taken over five days from Thursday through Monday, starting the night after the candidates' final debate and ending the day after former Secretary of State Colin Powell broke with the Republican Party to endorse Obama.

McCain's strong showing is partly attributable to his strong debate performance; Thursday was his best night of the survey. Obama's best night was Sunday, hours after the Powell announcement, and the full impact of that endorsement may not have been captured in any surveys yet. Future polling could show whether either of those was merely a support "bounce" or something more lasting.

During their final debate, a feisty McCain repeatedly forced Obama to defend his record, comments and associations. He also used the story of a voter whom the Democrat had met in Ohio, "Joe the plumber," to argue that Obama's tax plan would be bad for working class voters.

"I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody," Obama told the man with the last name of Wurzelbacher, who had asked Obama whether his plan to increase taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year would impede his ability to buy the plumbing company where he works.

On Wednesday, McCain's campaign unveiled a new TV ad that features that Obama quote, and shows different people saying: "I'm Joe the plumber." A man asks: "Obama wants my sweat to pay for his trillion dollars in new spending?"

Since McCain has seized on that line of argument, he has picked up support among white married people and non-college educated whites, the poll shows, while widening his advantage among white men. Black voters still overwhelmingly support Obama.

The Republican also has improved his rating for handling the economy and the financial crisis. Nearly half of likely voters think their taxes will rise under an Obama administration compared with a third who say McCain would raise their taxes.

Since the last AP-GfK survey in late September, McCain also has:

_Posted big gains among likely voters earning under $50,000 a year; he now trails Obama by just 4 percentage points compared with 26 earlier.

_Surged among rural voters; he has an 18-point advantage, up from 4.

_Doubled his advantage among whites who haven't finished college and now leads by 20 points. McCain and Obama are running about even among white college graduates, no change from earlier.

_Made modest gains among whites of both genders, now leading by 22 points among white men and by 7 among white women.

_Improved slightly among whites who are married, now with a 24-point lead.

_Narrowed a gap among unmarried whites, though he still trails by 8 points.

McCain has cut into Obama's advantage on the questions of whom voters trust to handle the economy and the financial crisis. On both, the Democrat now leads by just 6 points, compared with 15 in the previous survey.

Obama still has a larger advantage on other economic measures, with 44 percent saying they think the economy will have improved a year from now if he is elected compared with 34 percent for McCain.

Intensity has increased among McCain's supporters.

A month ago, Obama had more strong supporters than McCain did. Now, the number of excited supporters is about even.

Eight of 10 Democrats are supporting Obama, while nine in 10 Republicans are backing McCain. Independents are about evenly split.

Some 24 percent of likely voters were deemed still persuadable, meaning they were either undecided or said they might switch candidates. Those up-for-grabs voters came about equally from the three categories: undecideds, McCain supporters and Obama backers.

Said John Ormesher, 67, of Dandridge, Tenn.: "I've got respect for them but that's the extent of it. I don't have a whole lot of affinity toward either one of them. They're both part of the same political mess."

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AP Director of Surveys Trevor Tompson, AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

AP presidential poll: All even in the homestretch