Overnight Open Thread
Open | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:38:44 pm PDT
A clown is funny in the circus ring, but what would be the normal reaction to opening a door at midnight and finding the same clown standing there in the moonlight?
— Lon Chaney, Sr.
Friday Night Open
Open | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 6:40:25 pm PDT
Another open thread, as an excuse to say it’s time to reload the page again. You may want to clear your browser cache. The underpinnings have shifted.
Bugs will be dealt with.
Still There'll Be More
Politics | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 6:17:28 pm PDT
Hey, what a day, huh? What? You thought it was over? Legislative panel: Palin abused authority.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A legislative committee investigating Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has found she unlawfully abused her authority in firing the state’s public safety commissioner.
The investigative report concludes that a family grudge wasn’t the sole reason for firing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan but says it likely was a contributing factor.
The Republican vice presidential nominee has been accused of firing a commissioner to settle a family dispute. Palin supporters have called the investigation politically motivated.
McCain: 'You Do Not Have To Be Scared' of Obama As President
Politics | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 5:34:03 pm PDT
Way to go, John. Talking Points Memo jumped all over this one.
Krauthammer: Obama and Friends
Opinion | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 2:26:25 pm PDT
Charles Krauthammer is critical of both candidates in his Friday column: Obama & Friends: Judge Not?
McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.
This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely.
Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama’s associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.
Obama’s political career was launched with Ayers giving him a fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber — even a repentant one — he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he “didn’t do enough.”
Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright’s angry racism or Ayers’s unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?
No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.
Financial Yo-Yo Watch
Business | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 12:29:41 pm PDT
Good grief. The Dow plunged more than 700 points earlier, and now it’s rebounded all the way into positive territory.
Post-Debate Fox Poll: Obama Up by 7
Politics | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 11:02:11 am PDT
The latest Fox News poll of registered voters:
Barack Obama - 46%
John McCain - 39%
UPDATE at 10/10/08 11:14:23 am:
The RealClearPolitics averages:
Obama - 49.5%
McCain - 43.3%
Obama Campaign Met with Hamas and Hezbollah Supporters
Politics | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:07:38 am PDT
The Obama campaign is trying to minimize the damage from a meeting attended by their “Muslim outreach director,” at which several notorious Hamas and Hezbollah supporters were present: Obama concedes mistake over Muslim outreach meeting.
The Obama campaign’s Muslim outreach director participated in a meeting in mid September that was attended by several controversial Muslim activists, NBC News has learned. The Obama campaign now concedes that was a misjudgment, and that its top Muslim staffer would not have attended the meeting if she had known the full participant list beforehand. “Would a campaign staffer have attended if they were aware of the complete list of attendees? No,” said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email statement to NBC.
On September 15, newly named Muslim outreach director Minha Husaini spoke to a small group of Muslim leaders and potential Obama supporters at a hotel in Springfield, Virginia, several meeting participants and the campaign said. Two other Obama-affiliated Democratic Party workers joined Husaini and also spoke to the crowd. ...
One meeting attendee was Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society, several of the participants said. The MAS website describes Bray as an imam and “long time civil and human rights activist.” Bray’s critics say he has a history of defending terrorists. They point to a video of Bray at a rally in 2000, for example, in which he can be seen pumping his fist in the air in support of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. In a 2004 interview, he called the Israeli assassination of a Hamas spiritual leader an “unlawful, cowardly and dangerous act of state-sponsored terrorism.” Bray did not return a call requesting comment.
Also attending the meeting was Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR is a Muslim-American civil rights group that has, as its website states, “consistently and persistently condemned terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians.” Nonetheless, the group has many critics, especially in law-enforcement circles, and is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case.
In an interview on Thursday, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said that CAIR has consistently condemned “every act of terrorism” by groups including Hamas and Hezbollah. But he would not answer whether CAIR condemns those designated terrorist groups themselves. “I’ve already answered your questions,” he said, and abruptly ended the interview. Nihad Awad, the executive director, did not return a call seeking comment.
And that’s not all. Also attending the meeting was the Obama campaign’s previous “Muslim outreach director,” who abruptly resigned in August when the Wall Street Journal exposed his ties to extremists.
A second meeting participant speaking on condition on anonymity said he was stunned to learn that Awad and Bray had been invited to an event where Obama representatives would be present. The participant said Awad and Bray are considered politically “radioactive.” He said that some in the Obama group knew ahead of time that top CAIR officials would be in attendance—an allegation the Obama campaign disputes.
“Yes, when I knew they were coming it made me uncomfortable,” the attendee said. “There was some hope it wouldn’t get out” into the media, the attendee added. “There was some concern within the Obama camp that some of these people coming may be a political liability.”
Chicago-based lawyer Mazen Asbahi also attended the meeting. He is the Obama campaign’s former Muslim outreach coordinator, who abruptly resigned in August after the Wall Street Journal and websites that track fundamentalist Islam began questioning Asbahi’s involvement in an Islamic investment fund and various Islamic groups. When reached by NBC News, Asbahi would not comment about the September gathering or his brief stint eight years ago on an investment fund board which also included a fundamentalist imam.
When informed that Asbahi had attended the recent meeting, an Obama spokesman said: “Mazen Asbahi resigned from his role as the campaign’s Muslim American outreach coordinator and was replaced—he is not an employee of the campaign and does not speak on behalf of the campaign.”
Financial Crisis Watch
Business | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 8:36:05 am PDT
Another sell-off in the Asian markets, and the Dow average is about to go below 8,000...
Friday Morning Open
Open | Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 8:20:43 am PDT
Right after the last entry we posted last night, our Internet connection went down, and it just came back a little while ago. So here’s an open thread to contain all that pent-up verbiage we sense out there...
