[Guest post by DRJ]

If Obama’s extensive TV ads are any indication, he has a lot of cash to spend. Still, I wonder how much of that money is from questionable and foreign sources as revealed in this August 2008 article:

“Obama’s overseas (foreign) contributors are making multiple small donations, ostensibly in their own names, over a period of a few days, some under maximum donation allowances, but others are aggregating in excess of the maximums when all added up. The countries and major cities from which contributions have been received France, Virgin Islands, Planegg, Vienna, Hague, Madrid, London, AE, IR, Geneva,Tokyo, Bangkok, Turin, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Roma, Zurich, Netherlands, Moscow, Ireland, Milan, Singapore, Bejing, Switzerland, Toronto, Vancouver, La Creche, Pak Chong, Dublin, Panama, Krabi, Berlin, Geneva, Buenos Aires, Prague, Nagoya, Budapest, Barcelona, Sweden, Taipei, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Zurich, Ragusa, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Uganda, Mumbia, Nagoya, Tunis, Zacatecas, St, Croix, Mississauga, Laval, Nadi, Behchoko, Ragusa, DUBIA, Lima, Copenhagen, Quaama, Jeddah, Kabul, Cairo, Nassau(not the county on Long Island,lol), Luxembourg (Auchi’s stomping grounds), etc,etc,etc,

Half a million dollars had been donated from overseas by unidentified people “not employed”.

Digging deeper, all sorts of very bizarre activity jumped at us. Dr and JJ continued to break it down and pull data from various sources. We found Rebecca Kurth contributed $3,137.38 to the Obama Campaign in 112 donations, including 34 separate donations recorded in one day,

How about this gibberish donor on the 30th of April in 2008.

A donor named Hbkjb, jkbkj

City: Jkbjnj Works for: Kuman Bank (doesn’t exist)

Occupation: Balanon Jalalan Amount: $1,077.23

or the donor Doodad, The # of transactions = 1,044

The $ contributed = $10,780.00

This Doodad character works for FDGFDGF and occupation is DFGFDG.”

There have been more questionable donors uncovered since this article was written almost 2 months ago. On the other hand, some of the money could be coming from real Americans like Steve and Rachel Larman:

“A North Kansas City couple has been left scratching their heads after they became the victims of a political scam.

Steve and Rachel Larman say a strange credit card charge appeared on their statement this month — a $2300 donation to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Larman’s say they don’t want this to be about their political affiliation, but they say they’re not about to give the Obama campaign any help from their pocketbook.

They said they notified Chase, their credit card bank, to report the fraud.

“(They) said that they had seen-they were familiar with this,” said Steve Larman. “It was fraud, they believe through telemarketing but they were going to be doing some more investigations.”

It would be nice to learn the truth about these donations but it will never happen, because transparency is not a principle Barack Obama believes in.

— DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

I posted recently on a discussion between Barack Obama and an Ohio plumber (he’s since been identified as Joe Wurzelbacher who lives outside Toledo, Ohio) regarding how Obama’s tax plan would increase taxes on a plumbing business Joe wants to buy.

Today, Jake Tapper at ABC News has an expanded transcript on their discussion. You can click on the link for the full discussion but I was interested in this part:

Obama said, “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’re gonna be better off [sic] if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.“

Hot Air has the video.

I feel for Mr. Wurzelbacher. He worked long hours to earn the money to buy a plumbing business and now Obama tells him he will be forced to help everyone who has less than he does. No doubt that includes a few poorer plumbers who will take their tax refunds, as well as special low-interest loans Congress will no doubt vote to give low-income workers, and use these benefits to compete with Mr. Wurzelbacher’s new business.

So while I agree that a good economy should be good for everyone, giving lower-income people money doesn’t translate into good economic times. It’s unfair and it doesn’t last. It’s the difference between giving people fish or teaching them to fish … except it’s even worse because Obama wants to give people someone else’s fish.

Or as Obama puts it: The government is going to make you “spread the wealth around.”

— DRJ

[Guest post by DRJ]

In a 9-5 decision, the en banc Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the trial court’s TRO in the Ohio election law case. Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog believes the ruling will have these practical results [emphasis supplied]:

“A majority of the en banc court has reinstated a TRO, which will require the Ohio Secretary of State to send along to county elections boards those names that are a “mismatch” between voter registration and Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle records. The TRO does not require, and the en banc court majority emphasizes, that a county board is not required upon hearing of the mismatch to remove eligible voters from the rolls. But the court does suggest (on page 9 of the pdf) that it would be the basis for not counting absentee ballots of voters flagged as a mismatch barring further investigation by the board. There may also be some boards that could try to require mismatched voters voting in person to cast provisional ballots. And it also appears that to the extent the mismatch lists are public, it will provide the potential basis for challenges by the ORP on election day (though I believe it is now harder to mount such challenges in Ohio than it was in 2004, when the ORP threatened to make 35,000 challenges at the polls.”

Hasen has much more at his blog, including that he expects this decision will promptly be appealed to the Supreme Court:

“Because the issue presented here in part turns on whether this TRO comes too close to the election, in violation of the Supreme Court’s admonition in Purcell v. Gonzalez, I would expect a quick application for a stay of the en banc order directed to Justice Stevens, as Circuit Justice for the Sixth Circuit.”

In other words, stay tuned.

— DRJ

Did anyone have trouble accessing the site today?

After yesterday’s 2-hour outage during an Instapundit link and a mention of the site by Rush Limbaugh, the hosting company made some improvements. I noticed some slowness today around 6:45 a.m., and DRJ reported an outage sometime between 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Pacific time. However, the hosting company is telling me they don’t see evidence of any problems in the logs (other than some hacking attempts!), so I figured I’d ask the readers.

Even if there was an outage, it appears to have been brief — maybe 10-15 minutes — and thus likely did not affect most of you. But if anyone had trouble today at any time, please leave a comment telling me when it happened, and what type of problem you had.

In theory, this will all be fixed one day.

[Guest post by DRJ]

Like many conservatives, Beldar has Palin fever but he thinks he knows why it’s contagious: Because she’s having a grand old time.

— DRJ

Everyone in the country seems to think someone yelled “Kill him!” at a McCain/Palin rally, about Barack Obama. It’s just not true.

The “Kill him!” phrase was originally reported by the Washingon Post — and it was clearly yelled about William Ayers and not Barack Obama.

I quoted the relevant language in this post:

“And, according to the New York Times, he [referring to Ayers — P] was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,’” [Palin] continued.

“Boooo!” the crowd repeated.

“Kill him!” proposed one man in the audience.

That is unambiguously a call to kill Ayers, not Obama. As TNR writer Michael Crowley said in a comment to this post of his (h/t L.N. Smithee):

I took “kill him” to mean Ayers–not Obama. It’s just a far, far likelier explanation given the context. That’s still an ugly thing to shout–but on the other hand Ayers probably would have gotten the death penalty had his bombs actually taken a life. If I thought people were actually yelling that about Obama I would feel very differently.

Indeed. [UPDATE: Dana Milbank, who originally reported this, agreed. According to a Politico blog entry: “Milbank said that his impression was that the man meant Ayers, not Obama.” Thanks to “no one you know.”]

And yet outlets across the country are reporting that the man yelled “Kill him!” about Obama. For example, the New York Times reported:

Crowds in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have repeatedly booed Mr. Obama and yelled “off with his head,” and at a rally in Florida where Ms. Palin appeared without Mr. McCain, The Washington Post reported that a man yelled out “kill him.”

The implication is clear that “Kill him!” was yelled about Obama. This implication is made explicit in an article from the Associated Press:

The Secret Service confirmed Friday that it had investigated an episode reported in The Washington Post in which someone in Palin’s crowd in Clearwater, Fla., shouted “kill him,” on Monday, meaning Obama. There was “no indication that there was anything directed at Obama,” Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told AP. “We looked into it because we always operate in an atmosphere of an abundance of caution.”

Like many AP articles, this article has been reprinted in numerous publications, leading to the widespread myth that someone yelled “Kill him!” about Obama.

Incidentally, the stories are also reporting that someone yelled “Off with his head!” in reference to Obama. I’m not sure why I should believe them, since they’re lying about the “Kill him!” phrase. But let’s accept that as true for the sake of argument, and put this single isolated incident of a yelled threat to Obama in context. I have an isolated incident of Obama supporters threatening the life of someone on the McCain ticket, too. Obama supporters yelled Let’s stone her, old school!” outside a Palin rally, about Sarah Palin.

Oh, the ugliness of the left!

Ah, you say, but there has been widespread ugliness on the right, going beyond a single random call for violence against Obama. We’ve seen people calling Obama an “Arab” (not really an insult, but never mind that) or a “terrorist” or a “liar.” And you guys on the left don’t do ugly stuff like that, right?

Wrong.

We have the plethora of insults and booing of McCain at Obama rallies, including screaming that he is a “liar”; the ugly and profane T-shirts about Sarah Palin; and much more nasty and violent behavior from the left.

That’s the point I was making in my post yesterday, in which I wrote a story about the ugliness of the left in the same style as the media has been writing stories about the ugliness of the right.

We on the right have our random fringe lunatics, and so do you on the left. Stop pretending you’re better.

There’s only one difference between your fringe lunatics and ours: the media reports about ours.

UPDATE: I have a couple of commenters suggesting that this happened in Scranton as well. Not according to the Secret Service.

UPDATE: Now, the mythology of the lying left would have it, they didn’t just scream “Kill him!” referring to Obama (which itself never happened) — they even screamed “Kill Obama!”

But then, truth and “Retardo” were never too well acquainted.