WTF 1.2

[Trollbait]

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

AP: Obama aunt from Kenya living in US illegally

<snip>

Barack Obama's aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally

No comment.

[Harlowe]

What would a half-aunt on his father's side have anything to do with the election?

Oh yeah, it's the latest highlight from Drudge.

Hell Cindy McCain has a half-sister she lies about who was cut out of her father's will. Who cares.

[Harlowe]

Here you go...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=93708729

Kathleen Portalski was left $10,000, and her children were left nothing. It's a fact Nicholas Portalski says his sister discovered the hard way.

"What she found in town — on the day of or the day before or the day after his funeral — was that the credit card didn't work anymore," Nick says.

The Portalskis live in a modest home in central Phoenix. Kathleen is retired, as is her husband. Nicholas Portalski is a firefighter and emergency medical technician looking for work.

[Lurker]

No comment.

Posting the thread is a comment, doofus.

Seriously though, I heard his half-aunt is really pissed at Obama. Turns out she had her eye on this plumbing business that makes 250-280k a year...

[Ddrak]

Obviously she should face immigration court and the campaign should return the $260 she gave in donations. Did I miss anything?

Dd

[Harlowe]

That seems to be it, another compelling election headline brought to us by Drudge via Jecks.

The leaking of information by Federal Employees looks pretty shady though.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/241682.php

Breaking the Law for McCain
11.01.08 -- 10:08AM
By Josh Marshall

You may have noticed that the AP is reporting that Barack Obama's aunt (who he does not seem to have a relationship with) was denied asylum in the US four years ago and is now living illegally in Boston. Convenient timing, ain't it?

The real story, though, is down in the third paragraph of the AP story ...

Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.

That's about as transparent a red flag as an outfit like the AP is usually willing to give. And there you have it. Quite likely working in concert with the McCain campaign, a Bush administration official is leaking details on an immigration case to try to help McCain three days before the election. It's shades of Bush I's riffling through Bill Clinton's passport files just before the 1992 election in a desperate last minute gambit as they were swirling down the drain.

Late Update: Note too that the story first got leaked to the Times of London, a Murdoch paper with a history of taking planted stories from Republicans for siphoning back into the US media.

And appears that Obama has sporadic (every couple of years) contact with extended family on his father's side and his response is that appropriate laws should be followed.

Obama says he didn't know aunt's illegal status
Nov 1 11:23 AM US/Eastern
By NEDRA PICKLER
Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Saturday he didn't know that one of his relatives was living in the United States illegally and believes the appropriate laws should be followed.

The Associated Press found that Obama's aunt had been instructed to leave the country four years ago by an immigration judge who rejected her request for asylum from her native Kenya. The woman, Zeituni Onyango (zay-TUHN on-YANG-oh), is living in public housing in Boston and is the half-sister of Obama's late father.

A statement given to the AP by Obama's campaign said, "Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws be followed."

Onyango is part of Obama's large paternal family, with many related to him by blood whom he barely knows. Obama first met Onyango when he traveled to Africa as an adult—he referred to her as "Auntie Zeituni" in his memoir.

The campaign said he has seen her a few times since that meeting, beginning with a return trip to Kenya with his wife, Michelle, four years after the first trip. Onyango visited the family in Chicago on a tourist visa at Obama's invitation about nine years ago, the campaign said, stopping to visit friends on the East coast before returning to Kenya.

She attended Obama's swearing-in to the U.S. Senate in 2004, but campaign officials said Obama provided no assistance in getting her a tourist visa and doesn't know the details of her stay. The campaign said he last heard from her about two years ago when she called saying she was in Boston, but he did not see her there.

Onyango's refusal to leave the country would represent an administrative, noncriminal violation of immigration law, meaning such cases are handled outside the criminal court system. Estimates vary, but many experts believe there are more than 10 million such immigrants in the U.S.

According to Federal Election Commission documents filed by the Obama campaign, Onyango has contributed $260 to Obama over a period of time. Under federal election law, only U.S. citizens or green-card holders are legally permitted to give money to campaigns. Onyango, who listed her employer as the Boston Housing Authority, gave in small increments to the Obama campaign. Her latest contribution was $5 on Sept. 19.

[Harlowe]

This is amusing....Drudge is losing his influence. Huffington Post has double the traffic now and his smears just don't have the stick they use to.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6e6628f2-a5ef ... ck_check=1

[Trollbait]

LOL

I wonder if Obama is elected will she be deported....

[Trollbait]

Oh, by the way...

You seem concerned about the leaking of that info by federal employees but the following does not bother you?

http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/co ... ml?sid=101

[Lurker]

I have it on good authority that when Obama is elected the State is giving JTP's plumbing company to Obama's aunt and Joe is being rendered to Syria.

You seem concerned about the leaking of that info by federal employees but the following does not bother you?

Since you are the one posting this stuff, the question is why the one enraged you and this one doesn't. Invasion of privacy is invasion of privacy, right? Hypocrite.

[Harlowe]

Oh, by the way...

You seem concerned about the leaking of that info by federal employees but the following does not bother you?

http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/co ... ml?sid=101

Are you kidding? Do have some short-term memory issues or are you just completely obsessed with Joe the Plumber? The first time you posted about this - most, if not all, of us here (along with Obama) said that it should be investigated and the people dealt with legally.

Since you are the one posting this stuff, the question is why the one enraged you and this one doesn't. Invasion of privacy is invasion of privacy, right? Hypocrite.

Don't hold your breath on that, not once has Jecks posted a single critical thing regarding the McCain/Palin camp or the GOP since claiming to be voting for Obama way back when. All we see are posts parroting dramatically whatever recent nonsense Drudge is headlining.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

/6 degrees of separation from reality parody ON

McCain spent 5 years in Hanoi palling around with communists while his country needed him. That's the real WTF. Was he given leave for his little vacation? No, that means that he was AWOL the whole time. He even released an official statement at the time showing empathy towards his so-called captors, which was in direct opposition to the stated foreign policy goals of the country he was supposedly serving. Is that the kind of maverick we want?

And McCain probably knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone that had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, and yet he did nothing to stop those attacks. And some of the people who knew other people that knew people that he knew have perpetrated other despicable acts, none of which he's lifted a finger over. It's all just a matter of degrees before the evidence becomes overwhelmingly damning. Even more damning if you fine tune the context.

If there's a clearer case to be made of guilt by association, I sure haven't seen it, and I'm sure not associated with it.

EDIT: The wife wanted me to point out that McCain addressed a campaign rally yesterday as "My fellow prisoners". Freudian slip or head start on brainwashing?

/OFF

[Harlowe]

Cheney endorses McCain

Obama's prepared remarks...

I'd like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it. He served as Washington's biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq, and supports economic policies that are no different from the last eight years. So Senator McCain worked hard to get Dick Cheney's support.

But here's my question for you, Colorado: do you think Dick Cheney is delighted to support John McCain because he thinks John McCain's going to bring change? Do you think John McCain and Dick Cheney have been talking about how to shake things up, and get rid of the lobbyists and the old boys club in Washington?

Colorado, we know better. After all, it was just a few days ago that Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a "common philosophy." And we know that when it comes to foreign policy, John McCain and Dick Cheney share a common philosophy that thinks that empty bluster from Washington will fix all of our problems, and a war without end in Iraq is the way to defeat Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So George Bush may be in an undisclosed location, but Dick Cheney's out there on the campaign trail because he'd be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain. He knows that with John McCain you get a twofer: George Bush's economic policy and Dick Cheney's foreign policy -- but that's a risk we cannot afford to take.

I'm with Josh Marshall- this is well said indeed.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

McCainism

For my own part, obviously, I hope Barack Obama can pull off a victory on Tuesday. But more than that, I hope the result of the election can be a rebuke, a closing of the book on McCainism and the moral filth it has come to represent. I'm under no illusion that negative or even nasty campaigning will come to an end in the USA. I don't think that's realistic or even necessarily desirable. Hard-fought and brass-knuckle politics is something built into the fiber of American politics. It's part and parcel of the intensity of belief and passion that many of us have for the issues at stake in our elections.

But McCain's campaign has devolved into something altogether different ... what with its increasingly open appeals to racial conflict and aggressive invocations of blood hatred of Arabs and Muslims. As The New Republic phrases it, McCain's "subtle incitements of racial warfare and underhanded implications of foreign nativity." Over the months we've become desensitized to the moral depravity of McCain's campaign.

There is of course what appears to be a more conventional attack on economics and taxes. But 'socialism' refers, if we can speak in shorthand, to state ownership of large portions of the economy. In other words, something like the Bush administration's decision to have the government purchase a large amount of the financial services industry. But as John Judis notes, a closer look at the language and imargery McCain's 'socialism' pitch reveals it's actually "about whites paying their taxes so that lazy, indolent, unemployed blacks can live off them."

McCarthyism has rightly become an American shorthand for smearing liberals and anyone else from the center leftward as political traitors. The McCain campaign's current campaign of villification of Rashid Khalidi is cut from a very similar cloth -- the kind of rancid race-baiting that we sometimes see at the fringes of our politics but seldom quite so directly and formally from a national campaign, even going so far as to have McCain himself compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi. Where McCainism is different is in its particular amalgam of racism and xenophobia specially suited to this historical moment, to this opponent and to Americans' continuing fears of foreign threat from Muslims and Arabs seven years into the War on Terror.

We'll always have a national dark side. But some signal needs to be sent, at least for a while, that this sort of filth, his character assassination and appeals to race hatred is not an effective life raft for desperate opportunists looking to save themselves by degrading this country. A McCain defeat would go some way to accomplishing that.

--Josh Marshall

[Lurker]

Since Jecks was too cowardly to comment on his own thread, can someone explain what the point was?

[Harlowe]

But back to Jeck's recent WTF smear attempt...

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.c ... _smear.php

Here's how the right's big eleventh-hour smear on Obama was carried out.

First the Murdoch-owned Times of London reported Thursday that Obama's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, is living in a Boston public-housing complex. It's unclear how the paper learned of the woman's presence in the U.S.

From there, the story quickly got taken up by the right-wing echo chamber. Fox News (also Murdoch-owned, of course), Drudge, the Boston Herald, and various conservative blogs -- as well as some mainstream outlets -- began breathlessly hyping the story.

But the Times had been unable to tie up one key detail. It reported:

The Times could not determine their immigration status and an official at Boston City Hall said that Ms Onyango was a resident of Flaherty Way but not registered to vote on the electoral roll. However, that Ms Onyango made a contribution to the Obama campaign would indicate that she is a US citizen.

But that was easily taken care of. The Associated Press was the first to confirm, in a story posted this morning, that Onyango is here illegally after her request for asylum was rejected by an immigration judge four years ago.

But note the way in which AP seems to have obtained the information. High up in the story, it reports:

Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.

In other words, it looks like someone in the Bush administration leaked the information, with the goal of throwing a last-minute wrench into Obama's campaign. And someone else confirmed it, with similar motives.

On the record, of course, the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, is telling reporters it can't comment on any individual person's immigration status. It would appear to be a violation of department procedures, at the least, to leak such information.

We've seen this same tactic used recently by the Bush administration. Earlier this month, law enforcement sources leaked the news, also to the AP, that the FBI has begun a nationwide investigation into ACORN. Again, the obvious purpose of the leak was political -- to bolster a Republican campaign to stoke fears about voter fraud, in an effort to de-legitimize an Obama win. The Justice Department still has not confirmed the existence of the investigation.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Since Jecks was too cowardly to comment on his own thread, can someone explain what the point was?

Uh, a desperate perpetuation of the misguided belief that Obama is somehow a fraud? That Obama is somehow hoodwinking us in regards to the quality of his character? That the 'Truth is Out There' ?

[Embar Angylwrath]

Harlowe -

What the hell was that? Those leaps that person made in connecting the dots were all unsubstantiated. Hell, Superman can't leap that far. The dude ignores what he posted.. he posts something saying there are no political connections.. and uses that to say there were political connections.

WTF?

[Harlowe]

The whole thing is unsubstantiated.

ETA: actually I shouldn't say the whole thing is "unsubstantiated", it's all a bunch of bullshit attempting some sort of retarded last minute smear on Obama and has precisely zero to do with him or his campaign. I guess the al Qaeda video they've been hoping for (like 2004) hasn't shown up yet.

So really WTF.

[Lurker]

They were reading between the lines. Someone in the Federal government accessed the information and released it. Conyers wrote to the DoJ asking them to look into this.

Back to Jecks and his hypocrisy and cowardice...

There's a major difference between this case and the JTP privacy issue that Jecks got his panties in a bunch about. Here we don't just have the a government official accessing information they have the right to access, we have a government official leaking that information to the media. To what end? That his WTF thread focused entirely on the aunt is very telling about Jecks and his total lack of convictions.

[Harlowe]

I'll give McCain a little credit here, so far it's just the usual suspects - Drudge/Breit/Fox pushing the recent bs. McCain's camp has responded (so far)....

John McCain's campaign is steering clear of the issue. Time's Michael Scherer, a former reporter for Salon, writes that McCain aide Mark Salter said, "It's a family matter" and declined further comment.